Starting more than a decade past, among the biggest security firms on the planet, Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, attempted to damage competitors in the market into classifying benign files as malicious by deceiving their antivirus applications applications, according to two former workers.

They said the secret effort targeted AVG Technologies NV, Microsoft Corp, Avast Applications and other competitors, misleading a number of them into deleting or disabling significant files on their clients’ PCs.

“Eugene considered this larceny,” said one of the former workers. Both sources said they were among a tiny group of people who understood about the operation and requested anonymity.

Kaspersky Lab firmly denied that opponents had been deceived by it into categorizing clean files as malicious, so called false positives.

Executives at Microsoft, AVG and Avast formerly told Reuters that unidentified parties had attempted to get false positives lately. When contacted this week, they’d no opinion on the claim that they had been targeted by Kaspersky Lab.

The Russian business is just one of the most famous antivirus software manufacturers, boasting 270,000 corporate customers. and 400 million users Kaspersky has gained broad respect in the business for its analysis on the Stuxnet computer worm that sabotaged Iran’s atomic program in 2009 and 2010 and advanced Western spying software.

The urge to establish market share also factored into Kaspersky’s choice of opponents to sabotage was said by the two former Kaspersky Lab workers.

“It was determined to supply some difficulties” for competitors, said one ex-worker. “It isn’t just damaging for a rival firm but in addition damaging for users’ computers.”

The former Kaspersky workers said business research workers were assigned to work for months or weeks at a time on the sabotage jobs.

Their main job was to reverse engineer opponents’ virus detection software to determine the best way to trick them into flagging great files as malicious, the former workers said.

As the soaring variety of damaging computer programs have prompted security firms to share more info with each other the chance for such trickery has grown in the last decade along with a half, business specialists said.

Security firms could more rapidly identify new viruses and other malicious content by sharing all this information. But the cooperation also enabled firms to borrow heavily from each other’s work rather than locating files that were awful by themselves.

In an attempt to show that its work was being ripped off by other firms, Kaspersky said an experiment ran: It told VirusTotal that it regarded them as malicious and created 10 innocuous files. Them file and shares with security firms.

The former workers said, when Kaspersky’s criticisms didn’t lead to major change, it stepped up the sabotage.