McAfee Stops Lettings Foreign Governments See Its Source Code

Cineberg/Shutterstock.com

The company said such reviews create security risks.

While everyone is worrying about Kaspersky software on government systems, McAfee, a U.S.-based cybersecurity firm, is worried about government interference in its software.

The company will no longer let foreign governments, especially Russia, review its source code, a company spokesman told Reuters on Thursday.

McAfee was previously a part of tech giant Intel but left in April 2017. As an independent company, officials made the decision to end the reviews of their product, as they believed these reviews could open up their products to security vulnerabilities. The McAfee spokesman said they didn't have evidence of a specific security issue following the reviews.

Symantec, another purveyor of security software, made a similar move in 2016 and refused any government-mandated source code review requests. Symantec also cited security concerns as the reason for stopping this practice.