In times of such uncertainty, the best approach is to make sure your systems are as resilient as you can reasonably make them.” In our view, it would be prudent to plan for the possibility that this could happen. He added: “The war has proven many widely held beliefs wrong and the situation remains highly unpredictable. Levy said there was no evidence that Russia intends to suborn Russian commercial products and services to cause damage to British interests, but that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. “However, you may need to move to a new AV product if Kaspersky itself becomes subject to sanctions, since the AV product would likely stop getting updates, and AV software is only effective if it is updated regularly.” “If your personal laptop uses Kaspersky AV or other products, it is highly unlikely to be directly targeted and it is safe to turn on and use at the moment.

“It almost certainly remains the case that nearly all individuals in the UK, and many enterprises, are not going to be targeted by Russian cyber attack, regardless of whether they use Russian products and services. “We’ve had enquiries from people worried about their home IT,” said Levy. However, NCSC technical director Ian Levy said that since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the context surrounding such technologies has changed, and the organisation has fielded multiple enquiries from people using Kaspersky products and services. Five years ago, the NCSC published guidance on how it approaches, understands and manages the risk behind using technology products – including cloud-enabled services – when said product or service supply chains include states hostile to the UK’s national security, such as Russia.Īt that time, the NCSC said it had advised relevant departments within government to ensure they were not using Kaspersky – and its then CEO, Ciaran Martin, wrote to Westminster’s various permanent secretaries to advise them of this – and said the most pressing risks to the average enterprise were: not keeping software up to date, poor network configuration management and poor credential management.

Kaspersky is good