Mysterious operative haunted Kaspersky critics

[Eugene]

Source: Associated Press

AP Exclusive: Mysterious operative haunted Kaspersky critics

By RAPHAEL SATTER
April 17, 2019

-snip-

The Associated Press has learned that the mysterious man, who said his name was Lucas Lambert, spent several months last year investigating critics of Kaspersky Lab, organizing at least four meetings with cybersecurity experts in London and New York.

Giles said he met with Lambert twice last year, ostensibly to discuss Giles speaking at a cybersecurity conference that Lambert’s company was organizing. But Lambert seemed far more interested in finding out whether anyone had been paid to publicly undermine Kaspersky.

Kaspersky Lab declined to answer questions from the AP about whether it had any involvement with the meetings.

The operation targeting Giles and others came at a sensitive time for the Moscow-based company, which boasts one of the world’s most popular consumer antivirus products and a research unit widely respected for routinely exposing elite hacking groups.

U.S. officials had occasionally expressed wariness about the firm over the years, but criticism of the company intensified in the aftermath of Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election.

-snip-

Read more: https://apnews.com/a3144f4ef5ab4588af7aba789e9892ed

[dalton99a]

1. The Israeli Connection

The AP learned that Lambert also targeted Michael Daniel, who served as former president Barack Obama’s cybersecurity czar, though it is unclear whether he actually managed to meet with Daniel.

In an email exchange with the AP, Lambert insisted that he and his company were genuine, but he did not reply to follow-up questions about the multiple discrepancies in his story or make himself available for an interview. The AP could find no evidence of the existence of the firm Lambert said he worked for, Tokyo- and Hong Kong-based NPH Investments.

Research by Citizen Lab, an internet watchdog group based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School, suggests the Lucas Lambert operation is linked to an almost identical one involving a man calling himself Michel Lambert. Michel’s bungled attempt in a Manhattan restaurant to entrap John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the lab, was caught on camera by AP reporters two months ago.

The two Lamberts appear to be different individuals. A few days after the AP published Michel Lambert’s photo, he was outed as former Israeli intelligence officer Aharon Almog-Assouline. In a Canadian court filing , a Toronto attorney said Assouline “bears a striking similarity” to a man he identified as an operative for Black Cube, an Israeli private intelligence firm.

[Blue_Tires]

2. Of course Kaspersky is buddy-buddy with Wikileaks and Snowden

and he's barely tried to hide the fact that he's done work on behalf of Russian intelligence, but what the hell do I know?

[marble falls]

3. What the hell do any of us know? There needs to be more transparency and legal sanctions.