The Three Hacked US AV Companies by the Russians

I've been doing some online research about this topic but could not make any progress. Recall that on May 10th, it was revealed that a collective of Russian and English-speaking hackers were actively marketing the spoils of their data breaches at three US-based antivirus software vendors. This collective, which calls itself “Fxmsp,” was trying to sell both, the source code and the network access to the companies for $300,000.

Immediately thereafter, the CEO of Symantec resigned causing many to speculate that his company was one of the trifecta affected. Unfortunately and since then, nothing was revealed and no new information was divulged about the topic.

Did any of you guys hear anything new about this? Can anyone speculate to the names of the other 2 companies?

I am interested in this because I am trying to upgrade my systems' security and would like to steer clear of any hacked AV systems.

All things considered, probably the safest bet would be to go with a foreign player like Kaspersky. That is of course if one ignores the US government warnings about this organization.

I have even heard that Malwarebytes was one of the breached firms. God, I hope not.

I'd just roll Romanian and use Bitdefender Free. I used it before and have it on my parents computer. It's light weight, cloud based and not full of bloat. Pretty much all you need. I don't use it anymore and just use Sandboxie for my browser and scan all downloads at Virus Total. I also scan my computers periodically for the heck of it but nothing ever found. I use several tools. One is Freefixer which shows you changes on your system. Another is Stream Armor and Ring3 Hook scanner as well as Sanity Check. You really can surf the Internet without anti-virus software so long as you don't surf shady sites and scan all downloads at Virus Total. And with the combination of Sandboxie that helps with rouge scripts and what have you. Although, Sandboxie as of late were having server issues. The latest version of 5.30 can be downloaded though.

If something does happen you should always have a clone on an external HDD to use.

Lacking any evidence to prove otherwise, I am going with the following conclusions:

1. Trend Micro,
2. McAfee,
3. Norton (Symantec).