Kaspersky admits taking inactive files in pursuit of hackers

San Francisco

EUGENE Kaspersky said that his company's widely used antivirus software has copied files that did not threaten the personal computers (PCs) of those customers, a sharp departure from industry practice that could increase suspicions that the Moscow-based firm aids Russian spies.

The acknowledgement, made in an interview last Friday as part of the Reuters Cyber Security Summit, comes days after Mr Kaspersky's company said that its software had copied a file containing US National Security Agency (NSA) hacking tools from the home computer of an agency worker in 2014. "We did nothing wrong," Mr Kaspersky added in the interview.

He said the files containing the NSA hacking tools were taken because they were part of a larger file that included suspicious software. Such actio…