This gives a new meaning to "fake it 'til you make it."
That's what former employees say happened at Kaspersky Lab for more than 10 years. They say the Russian antivirus firm did it to damage its rivals.
Kaspersky Lab tricked other companies into deleting important files by marking them as "false positives."
Reuters explains how they did it:
Some of the attacks were ordered by Kaspersky Lab's co-founder, Eugene Kaspersky, in part to retaliate against smaller rivals that he felt were aping his software instead of developing their own technology, they said.
"It was decided to provide some problems" for rivals, said one ex-employee. "It is not only damaging for a competing company but also damaging for users' computers."
Their chief task was to reverse-engineer competitors' virus detection software to figure out how to fool them into flagging good files as malicious, the former employees said.
