Kaspersky sues Rising

Feuding AV firms to fight it out in court.

Kaspersky's Chinese subsidiary has brought a court case against local rival Rising, after an escalating war of words between the two companies.

The row began in late May, when Kaspersky suffered a false positive, detecting a component of Rising's anti-spyware product as a trojan. Rising responded by claiming that Kaspersky had wrongly detected a wide range of items and showed no respect for Chinese users, already upset by the crippling Symantec false positive the same month.

Kaspersky's Beijing-based local subsidiary responded by claiming that the detection was caused by Rising including unencrypted signatures in its product, a practice widely regarded as unsafe, and suggesting that Rising was using the incident to gather publicity.

Rising then announced plans to sue Kaspersky for defamation, and now Kaspersky has brought its own suit, alleging unfair competitive practices and defamation, which should be heard in a Tianjin court later this month.

Information on the row can be found at the Chinese Internet Security Response Team (CISRT) blog, here, and in a piece from the Chinese branch of Russian news agency Interfax, here.

09 July 2007

Tags: china, kaspersky, rising. del.icio.us digg this