I am sure you won't like this - A cybersecurity company faked hacks and extorted clients to buy its services

I guess they had a simple three step strategy: 

1. Hack a company
2. Inform the company and force them to get their service.
3. If they don't listen , destroy them (I am not exaggerating)

After all Fear is the best sales tool (Governments use them regularly )



From the article:

In a federal court this week, Richard Wallace, a former investigator at cybersecurity company Tiversa, said the company routinely engaged in fraud -- and mafia-style shakedowns.

The results were disastrous for at least one company that stood up to Tiversa and refused to pay.

In 2010, Tiversa scammed LabMD, a cancer testing center in Atlanta, Wallace testified. Wallace said he tapped into LabMD's computers and pulled the medical records.

The cybersecurity firm then alerted LabMD it had been hacked. Tiversa offered it emergency "incident response" cybersecurity services. After the lab refused the offer, Tiversa threatened to tip off federal regulators about the "data breach."

When LabMD still refused, Tiversa let the Federal Trade Commission know about the "hack."

Follow the link below for more details:

http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/07/technology/tiversa-labmd-ftc/index.html

AV Vendors should try to get better - Not Cheat

Tencent is one vendor that attempted to cheat 

From the article:

As part of our research, we found that all the tools we're using for the performance benchmark were "whitelisted" using their name (Eg "AcroRd32.exe"), so the Tencent scan engine won't check them anymore," Marx said.

This only applied to exactly the programs we're using (some are well know, like Acrobat Reader, but some are less commonly used).

"The "whitelist" was even extended from month to month by exactly the tools we used for the next benchmark, so this optimisation was clearly focusing on our tests only."

Once the tools were renamed, Tencent product performance decreased significantly, confirming the test-specific optimisations.

Follow the link below for more details

http://www.crn.com.au/News/403708,second-chinese-security-vendor-caught-cheating.aspx