But in the national security space there are some obvious risks around foreign ownership.” It isn’t everything, and nor is it a simple matter of flags – there are Western companies who have non-Western contributors to their supply chain, including from hostile states. He added: “That’s why the country of origin matters. In a succinct explanation for his decision to issue the warning, Martin said that in order to do its job effectively, antivirus software had, by its very nature, to be “highly intrusive within a network” and able to “communicate back to the vendor” – whose operatives, in the case of Kaspersky Lab, are headquartered in the Russian capital. The warning does not apply to the public at large, only to government departments. Martin said the NCSC “advise that where it is assessed that access to the information by the Russian state would be a risk to national security, a Russia-based antivirus company should not be chosen”. Russia has the intent to target UK central government and the UK’s critical national infrastructure.” This includes espionage, disruption and influence operations. Though Levy has stressed the issue is “complex and nuanced” and has urged people to stay calm, a letter to permanent secretaries - the civil service heads of government departments - from his boss, Ciaran Martin, makes clear: “The NCSC advises that Russia is a highly capable cyber threat actor which uses cyber as a tool of statecraft. The decision to single out a particular nation state in a warning note issued shortly before the start of the weekend marks a change of tone from the NCSC, whose technical director Ian Levy refused to be drawn on which countries were in the frame for cyber mischief when he was interviewed by E&T about the subject earlier this year. Russian-based firms’ software, including popular anti-virus protection from the Moscow-based provider Kaspersky Lab, has not been verified as safe to use by the NCSC and might potentially be being used to extract sensitive data and relay it to the Kremlin. Cyber-security products from Russian-based firms should never be used by government computer systems processing the most sensitive types of information, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has said.
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