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The targeted nature of it screams ‘state actor’

Even if Kaspersky is somehow working with Russian intelligence, it’s a good thing that there are groups out there willing to call shenanigans on US-aligned intelligence operations.

ASUS is a Taiwanese company. Wouldn't be surprised if China is behind this.

This statement is ridiculous. If you state that since ASUS does a lot of its manufacturing in mainland China, then maybe I can get behind you. The original statement simply reveals your complete lack of geopolitical common sense.

It's hard to guess who could be behind this or really anything about it without a world map portraying the rough geographic distribution of devices.

Kaspersky has the MAC address list so they probably know who was the target.

That's what I mean. They may not have installations on all the MACs in the list, but they certainly know the whereabouts of the intersection of the two and would be able to provide the map I was referring to.

This is a good reminder that you better disable auto-updates if you don't want to become auto-backdoored.

Malicious updates for Asus laptops – Kaspersky Lab official blog