After a review by the General Services Administration, the White House and intelligence agencies, Russian cybersecurity software firm Kaspersky Lab may no longer sell to federal agencies via civilian acquisition contract vehicles.
Kaspersky was dropped from the pre-approved vendors list provided by NASA’s Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement contract vehicle and GSA’s Schedule 70, due to concerns the company may have links to Russian state-sponsored hacking. The ban also covers Schedule 67, for GSA’s photographic equipment and supplies.
Language included in the Senate 2018 NDAA defense bill included a ban on Kasperky products. Director of the National Security Agency Admiral Mike Rogers told the Senate in May that he was “personally involved” in the Kaspersky review. All five intelligence agency heads said at the time they would not use Kaspersky products on their networks, FCW reports.
“GSA’s priorities are to ensure the integrity and security of U.S. government systems and networks and evaluate products and services available on our contracts using supply chain risk management processes,” a GSA spokesperson said, reported FCW.
For its part, Kaspersky denies any ties to the Russian government and says that “the company has never helped, nor will help, any government in the world with its cyberespionage efforts.”
” The company has a 20 year history in the IT security industry of always abiding by the highest ethical business practices and trustworthy development of technologies, and Kaspersky Lab believes it is completely unacceptable that the company is being unjustly accused without any hard evidence to back up these false allegations,” the company said in a statement.
While Kaspersky antivirus products are bundled into a host of routers, chips and software products by other companies like Cisco, Juniper, D-Link, Amazon, Microsoft, and others, the company does less than $1 million worth of business directly with the U.S. federal government. It’s unclear whether the ban will include Kaspersky’s embedded technologies, a federal information security official told FCW.
