Re: I wonder how much this is helping their sales...
"you now feel that the U.S. government doesn't have a clue and does not act in their own best interests."
No, I am pretty sure they are operating in their best interests, however their interests and the interests of their people very rarely overlap. I've felt this way since DayGlo was still hip and Disco wasn't dead.
But, my reasoning is mostly due to why the US banned Kaspersky. Some NSA worker took a bunch of classified documents home, including some zero-day code. Said NSA worker then disabled their antivirus so the can run a keygen for Microsoft Office (which, big surprise, infected his machine with all kinds of nasties). He then started his antivirus back up, which noticed the infections from the keygen and also noticed some new code it didn't have a definition for, but it still had all the hallmarks of malware. So, the antivirus then beamed the data back to HQ for further analysis where automated tools can be thrown at it to determine if it is a new piece of malware, new strain of an existing one, or just a false positive. Kaspersky, without knowing exactly what they were dealing with, then produced definition files countering the US's unreleased cyber weapons.
So really, its that a Russian company did something a competent company does, but the US thought it was part of some grand conspiracy / spy operation (The current administration sure loves going to that well...). Because what other explanation is there to some of their cyber weapons being neutralized well before deployment other than someone trying to sabotage the Glorious Leader?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
