Kaspersky's "Malware" Identification of KineticD's software is a False Positive

On Monday June 4, Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 applied an update to their antivirus program that incorrectly categorized several online backup solutions, such as KineticD and Symantec, as malware. When a backup program is identified as malware, it is quarantined by the antivirus program, which prevents the backup program from operating on the user’s system.

Once we were notified of the issue, we immediately brought it to the attention of the Kaspersky team. After the issue was researched by the Kaspersky team, it was officially classified as a “false positive,” meaning the Kaspersky support team confirmed to incorrectly classifying the KineticD backup software as malware.

This is the first such issue KineticD has ever experienced in our 10+ years of operation, as we follow strict processes for making sure our backup client executables are always signed and certified by Microsoft.

While this was an unfortunate incident, and one that did cause some confusion for KineticD customers, the Kaspersky team dealt with it professionally and reacted to the issue right away. They admitted their mistake, confirmed it as a false positive, and began working on a fix.

It is important to note that this was a problem that was only identified with the KineticCloud Backup for PCs desktop client, and not the KineticCloud Backup for Servers client. At the time of this writing, all issues with the current version of the KineticCloud Backup for PCs client have been resolved, and backups have resumed as normal. We must note that there could still be a problem with older versions of the KineticCloud for PCs clients (3.1677 or below) but Kaspersky is still actively working on a fix.  To know if you are currently running the new or old version of KineticCloud Backup for PCs, see the screenshots below:

Sample screenshot of the new version of KineticCloud Backup for PCs:

Sample screenshot of the old version of KineticCloud Backup for PCs:

We thank our loyal customers for your patience with this matter, and will continue to update you as soon as we have new information.