Following in the lead of Sony BMG's DRM and Symantec's Norton SystemWorks, Kaspersky now join the field in being accused of using "rootkit" style functionality. The issue appears to be that Kapersky's Antivirus software actively hides alternate data streams (an NTFS feature) using the same rootkit style code that Sony BMG and Norton SystemWorks used. However unlike Sony BMG, both Symantec and Kapersky take a more responsible approach. The act of hiding data and files from all applications and the OS on a system remains questionable however.

Symantec's response to the problem was to make it easy to uninstall the functionality that hides files in their current product. Kaspersky's response is that the next version of their product will not have the data hiding functionality.

More info over at Kaspersky's Blog.

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