I agree that it smells a bit, but take a quick look at the author, Joseph Menn. He's been floating around tech reporting for a while and seems to have some netsec chops. This isn't an article coming out of the State Department or some anonymous blog; there's a name behind it of someone who'd have their reputation to lose if it turned out to be a bunch of false allegations. (Not that that's never happened before...)

It's impossible to prove that these allegations were false. So there's no reputation to lose.

The only ways i can think of to prove innocence (in general) are a) an alibi b) finding who actually did it.

Both of these don't work here, you can't have an alibi for the whole company for 10 years, obviously. You can't find out who did "it" because there's no concrete example. At the very best you can prove that others did it too.

If any if the downvoters could elaborate why I'm wrong I'd appreciate that. I really don't know.

I wouldn't put too much weight into his reputation. John Broder (of NYT) also had a good reputation for journalistic integrity until he posted a falsified[1] review piece of a Tesla.

[1]http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/most-peculiar-test-drive

If the information turns out to be false then the anonymous sources get blamed, not the author.

Yeah, I have to agree, at least as far as the headline. Kaspersky is a serious and respected vendor in the industry and has been for a long time now. Identifying them as a "Russian antivirus firm" in this context sounds a little jingoist to me. (e.g. how often do you hear about "British CPU vendor ARM" or "Abu Dhabian semiconductor giant GlobalFoundries").

That said, the trick is pretty vile. Deliberately polluting public malware databases hurts us all.

It's great that you read these things with some suspicion, but would you use the same suspicion when reading allegations against US or European companies?

And, their main development being done in Moscow, do you expect current employees to stick their heads up? There aren't a lot of protections for whistle blowers in Russia. I'm pretty sure they'd be declared traitors, if they did reveal something like this in a formal setting.

Yes, if they were in a similar position. You have to admit, Kaspersky lab has been making a lot of powerful enemies this last decade or so. With cyber-security as big of a deal as it is now, it's obvious that smear campaigns would be on the table of options. (That said, how would I know, they could have done this. But I'll argue the paranoia is strongly warranted.)

When a report comes out purely based some unnamed sources without any hard evidence, I am always suspicious irrespective of whether it is about US, European, Russian companies.

I, for one, would, yes.

How would you read them if they were coming from a Russian news source?

Always question sources... Don't just question those you don't agree with or the top dog. Question your supporters, their motives, question the under dog too, the under dog is the most likely to take advantage of sympathies.

Why would they? The context is different.