FCC Adds Russian Cybersecurity Company Kaspersky Lab to List of National Security Risks

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has added Kaspersky Lab, a Russian cybersecurity company, to the list of companies posing an “unacceptable” risk to U.S. national security, a report says.

This marks the first time a Russian company has been added to the list.

The list is primarily made up of companies from China like Huawei and ZTE.

Businesses in the U.S. are not allowed to use federal subsidies provided through the FCC’s Universal Service Fund to buy any products or services from the companies on the list.

Kaspersky was added alongside China Telecom and China Mobile International USA as of Friday, March 24.

Kaspersky responded to this by saying the decision had been made on political grounds in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Kaspersky said the company will still be willing to cooperate with U.S. government agencies to address the concerns of various regulatory agencies.

“I am pleased that our national security agencies agreed with my assessment that China Mobile and China Telecom appeared to meet the threshold necessary to add these entities to our list,” said FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel in a press release. “Their addition, as well as Kaspersky Labs, will help secure our networks from threats posed by Chinese and Russian state-backed entities seeking to engage in espionage and otherwise harm America’s interests.”

PYMNTS wrote that Kaspersky had detected 1.5 billion attacks against Internet of Things devices in the first six months of last year. It did so using “honeypots,” or software that impersonates a vulnerable device, research from the company said.

Read more: Kaspersky Detects 1.5B IoT Cyberattacks This Year

Kaspersky research found that there’d been twice as many attacks compared to the first six months of 2020.

IoT devices consist of things like connected appliances, smartwatches and voice assistants.

Kaspersky security expert Dan Demeter said IoT devices have become essential, so cybercriminals have switched their attention to them.

“We see that once users’ interest in smart devices rose, attacks also intensified,” he said. “Some people believe they aren’t important enough to be hacked, but we’ve observed how attacks against smart devices intensified during the past year.”