It couldn’t have been a more ironic situation when Kaspersky, a Russian based security firm that is known for its anti virus software fell victim to cyber criminals as their own website was compromised by hackers. Users who visited the website to download the antivirus software were redirected to a malicious website that encouraged them to download fake antivirus software.

Though the company initially declined that anything was wrong, even after some customers complained to their forum, they did eventually confirm that the site had been attacked on Sunday. A vulnerable third party application that had been used for the website’s administration had been exploited by the cyber criminals.

Kaspersky claimed that after the problem had been notified, the process of redirecting users to the fake website continued only for 3 hours and 10 minutes, post which the affected server was taken offline.

The website is up and running now with a fully secure server, ant virus applications can be safely downloaded.

However, Kaspersky takes events like this where their own security is put to risk very seriously and is conducting investigations to identify reasons for their website being compromised. They are also taking care to find out if any individual’s details were compromised from their servers during the attack. Their researchers have offered to help users remove the fake anti virus that they were redirected to from the original website.