Kaspersky seems to be getting into more trouble in the US with its services being either banned or grounded. Months after the US Government ordered its federal agencies to stop using any internet security software provided by Kaspersky Lab.
Kaspersky indicated it had appealed to a US federal court on the grounds the ban it was hit with is unconstitutional because it denied the company a right to due process regarding the validity of the accusation.
Recently Kaspersky’s advertisements were banned from Twitter for “using a business model that inherently conflicts with acceptable Twitter Ads business practices”.
Eugene Kaspersky in a quick and angry open letter has said that even if Twitter reverses its decision, his company will not advertise on the platform, opting instead to donate the money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to fund the fight against online censorship.
No matter how this situation develops, we won’t be doing any more advertising on Twitter this year.
The whole of the planned Twitter advertising budget for 2018 will instead be donated to the @EFF. They do a lot to fight censorship online.
— Eugene Kaspersky (@e_kaspersky) April 20, 2018
In the letter addressed to “Mr. Dorsey and the rest of the senior management of Twitter”, Eugene Kaspersky writes:
I see that of late you’ve been having concerns about the “health” of your social media platform, and how it can be used maliciously for spreading disinformation, creating social discord, and so on. As a long-time advocate of a safe and friendly internet, I share these concerns! Though I thought my company stood on the periphery of this social media storm, it turns out I was quite mistaken.
At the end of January of this year, Twitter unexpectedly informed us about an advertising ban on our official accounts where we announce new posts on our various blogs on cybersecurity (including, for example, Securelist and Kaspersky Daily) and inform users about new cyberthreats and what to do about them. In a short letter from an unnamed Twitter employee, we were told that our company “operates using a business model that inherently conflicts with acceptable Twitter Ads business practices.”
Eugene adds that Twitter is “playing into the hands of cybercriminals when it hinders us providing users, for example, with timely, potentially important information on protection from cyber-extortionists”, calling on the platform to reverse its decision.
Allegations that Moscow-based Kaspersky, which sold more than $600 million of anti-virus software globally in 2015, knowingly or unknowingly helped Russian intelligence steal top-secret information from the US have effectively killed its business here and hurt its worldwide reputation