Kaspersky Succumbs to Hackers

Proving that no company is immune to hacking, security firm Kaspersky Labs had its databases pried open by clever hackers.

If you felt a little bit foolish last time you were taken advantage of by a cunning hacker, give yourself a break: It even happens to the guys who know what they’re doing. In what could be called the computer equivalent of a break-in at the police station, databases at the computer security company Kaspersky were hacked last weekend.

The company, known for its Kaspersky Anti-Virus suite, received a letter from hackers on Saturday morning warning of an impending threat before the site was hacked around noon, and restored by Kaspersky to an older version only minutes later, according to the timeline given by USA Today.

On the Portugese HackersBlog, a poster known as Unu demonstrated how he was able to gain access to Kaspersky’s databases using a technique known as SQL injection.

“Honestly, this is not good for any company and especially not good for a company dealing with security," Roel Schouwenberg, Kaspersky’s senior antivirus researcher, told USA Today in a phone conference.

Though bits of data from Kaspersky’s internal databases were temporarily accessible to hackers, the company has assured users that their personal data was never breached.