The news agency has interviewed two Kaspersky ex-employees who state that Kaspersky targeted Microsoft, AVG and Avast and other rivals.

Reuters’ sources claim they were part of just a small group of people who know about the sabotage, which peaked from 2009 to 2013.

“Our company has never conducted any secret campaign to trick competitors into generating false positives to damage their market standing. Such actions are unethical, dishonest and illegal”, it said. But when I do, I see false positives.

The employees claim that Kaspersky carried out such behaviour for more than a decade, even going as far as to reverse-engineer rival products in order to pinpoint exactly how they spotted threats.

The bay area Beginning several years ago, one of the most prominent intrusion establishments on earth, Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, started to destruction rivals around by deceiving their own antivirus plans into determining civilized archive as malignant, according to a couple of former personnel.

It is not only damaging for a competing company but also damaging for users’ computers. Kaspersky allegedly had researchers working from “weeks to months” on the project.

Their chief task was to reverse-engineer competitors’ virus detection software to figure out how to fool them into flagging good files as malicious, the former employees said.

However Kaspersky refute this and said that it has been the victim of such a campaign in the past. These companies license each other’s virus-detection engines, and sent suspicious files to third-party aggregators such as Google Inc’s VirusTotal. In 2010, Kaspersky Lab analyst Magnus Kalkuhl announced that the company had, as an experiment, created 10 harmless files and told the tracking site VirusTotal-which aggregates data on malware files-that it considered them malicious. Within a week and a half, 14 security companies had declared Kaspersky’s harmless files to be unsafe. Accusations by anonymous, disgruntled ex-employees that Kaspersky Lab, or its CEO, was involved in these incidents are meritless and simply false. But Microsoft’s antimalware research director, Dennis Batchelder, told Reuters that he remembered instances of customers calling in to complain that necessary pieces of software-like the code to make a printer run-had been deemed a threat and put in quarantine. The files were in some cases widely shared by antivirus vendors, and some were submitted anonymously over the Tor network.