Tech
Kaspersky defends force-replacing its security software without users’ explicit consent
Earlier this week, some U.S. customers of Kaspersky’s antivirus were surprised to find out that the Russian-made software disappeared from their computers and had been replaced by a new antivirus called UltraAV, owned by American company Pango.
The move was the result of the U.S. government’s unprecedented ban on Kaspersky, which prohibited the sale of any Kaspersky software in the country. The ban on selling the company’s software became effective on July 20, while the ban on providing subsequent security updates to existing customers will become effective on September 29.
A spokesperson for Pango, the cybersecurity company that owns UltraAV, defended the automatic migration, which in practice meant roughly a million U.S. Kaspersky customers became UltraAV customers overnight. At a technical level, that meant Kaspersky uninstalled itself from customers’ machines, and UltraAV installed itself, without any user interaction.
That lack of user interaction — or request for consent — is what confused and concerned some former Kaspersky customers.
“Basically, on my computers, Kaspersky pushed an uninstall of the Kaspersky products and pushed an automatic install of UltraAV & UltraVPN onto my computers,” Avi Fleischer, a former customer of Kaspersky, had previously told TechCrunch. “They should’ve given me the option to accept UltraAV or not.”
“They should NEVER push software onto someone’s computer without explicit permission,” said Fleischer.
Kaspersky’s spokesperson Francesco Tius told TechCrunch that “the migration process started at the beginning of September, of which all Kaspersky customers in the U.S. eligible for the transition were informed in an email communication.” Tius said that for Windows users, the transition “was done automatically.”
Tius said in the email that this was done to ensure Windows users “would not experience a gap in protection upon Kaspersky’s exit from the market.” (Windows 10 and 11 have their own baked-in antivirus made by Microsoft, called Defender. If a Windows user has a third-party antivirus, and then uninstalls it, Defender switches back on automatically, according to Microsoft.)
Users on Mac, Android, and iOS devices, on the other hand, “needed to manually install and activate the service following the instructions on the email,” said Tius.
Tius blamed the fact that some users were unaware of the transition on them not having “an email registered with Kaspersky.”
“These users were informed of the transition via in-app message only,” said Tius, who also pointed to an FAQ posted on UltraAV’s website. Neither the in-app message, nor UltraAV’s website, explicitly say that Windows users would experience a software uninstalling itself and installing a completely different software. On top of that, UltraAV is a brand-new antivirus with no previous track record or published security audit, adding to the concerns of customers.
Pango spokesperson Sydney Harwood made largely the same points as Tius in a series of emails with TechCrunch.
Rob Joyce, the former director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency, wrote in a series of posts on X that this automatic migration showed why granting Kaspersky software trusted access to anyone’s computer was a “huge risk.”
“They had total control of your machine,” wrote Joyce.
Martijn Grooten, a cybersecurity consultant and the former editor of Virus Bulletin, a publication covering the antivirus industry since 1989, told TechCrunch that “ultimately, if you install software, it can update itself to become something entirely new, change branding and/or change ownership.”
“That’s all a risk you implicitly accept and all of it happens regularly,” he said, adding that he does not remember another time an antivirus did the same thing. “They should have probably informed people better, given that security software depends on trust, but even in that case, some people would have ignored the warning.”
Tech
Cathie Wood’s ARK makes its first lead investment in startup Lucra — and it isn’t AI
ARK Invest Venture Fund has made its first-ever lead investment in an early-stage startup called Lucra, firm founder Cathie Wood told TechCrunch.
“We feel pretty excited about it,” Wood (pictured above) said in the recent interview regarding the investment in the startup.
Lucra developed a software platform that reimagines corporate loyalty programs into interactive, esports-like events such as tournaments where customers can play each other, even betting or winning cash or company giveaways. The startup said its customers include Five Iron Golf, Chess Kings, and Dave & Buster’s.
Lucra announced on Wednesday that it raised a $20 million Series B, led by the ARK fund, with participation from Alumni Ventures, Astralis Capital, Harlo Equity Partners, Simplex Ventures, SeventySix Capital, and WTI.
There are a few reasons why the famed financial company has never led a startup deal before. For one, the ARK Invest Venture Fund is not a typical VC fund. It’s an SEC-regulated interval fund (also known as a closed-end mutual fund), meaning anyone can invest in it, for as little as $500. However, it is not traded on a public exchange, so investors cannot sell shares at will. They can sell limited shares on specific dates, quarterly.
Wood also noted that the person running the fund, director of research Nick Grous, “is a tough sell,” leaving startups with the difficult task of getting him excited enough to advocate to lead a deal.
What’s even wilder is that ARK was particularly gun-shy about this sort of business because it got burned after investing in a somewhat similar company a few years ago.
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“We had actually owned a company called Skillz, which kind of operated in this space,” Grous said. “It didn’t work out well for us and many other investors.”
Skillz was a once-hot public company that later became mired in troubles and lawsuits. The big difference, the investor said, is that Lucra is a B2B platform, selling interactive esports as a loyalty program, rather than trying to license and run games directly to consumers.
“Overcoming our initial hurdle, especially given our experience with Skillz, overcoming our reticence, having Nick overcome it, that was our first screen,” Wood said of how this startup convinced her company to write a big check.
In this case, ARK Invest had participated in Lucra’s previous Series A round, and had grown familiar with its business model, its trajectory, and its founder and CEO Dylan Robbins, Grous told TechCrunch.
“We had been in constant communication,” Grous said, adding that his venture-esq fund attempts to have quarterly conference calls with the startups in the portfolio, similar to how public companies report to investors quarterly. ARK mostly works in the public market, offering a slate of publicly traded EFT funds.
Despite already being in the portfolio, Lucra’s founder was grilled numerous times when it came time to buy more shares — first by Grous and then ARK’s investment committee, both he and Wood described.
During those calls, Robbins “had thought about all the things that went wrong” with similar companies like Skillz, as well as with Lucra, and had answers, Wood said. “No matter how many times we went at him, his conviction, there was just no let up,” she described.
It also helped that this company’s financials were promising, it was in an area that ARK knew well, and this was not AI, aka the most hyped, most expensive area these days.
“We’ve been underwriting the sports-betting space, understanding the gamification aspects of entertainment,” Grous said, meaning that the investment firm could “really understand the opportunity here.”
The ARK Invest Venture Fund holds shares of companies like Epic Games, Kalshi, and Discord, for instance. It also holds OpenAI, Anthropic, Replit, Grok, and Perplexity, so it knows the AI scene well.
“We are all over AI, just like everyone else, because it is a massive revolution,” Wood explained. “But in the process, a lot of companies are being neglected.” This means that spotting such potentially neglected companies is “our opportunity because we are doing research in many other areas than AI,” she said.
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Tech
Cosmetics giant Rituals confirms data breach of customer membership records
Netherlands-based cosmetics giant Rituals has confirmed a data breach affecting customers’ personal information after hackers stole reams of data from its membership database.
The company disclosed the breach on Wednesday, according to an email sent to customers that TechCrunch has viewed and verified.
Rituals said it identified an “unauthorized download” of members’ data in April that contained customers’ full name, date of birth, gender, postal and email address, and phone number, as well as their preferred Rituals store and account type.
When reached by TechCrunch, Rituals spokesperson Eline van Malssen said the hacker stole membership data about customers in Europe and the United Kingdom.
TechCrunch has learned that some customers notified by Rituals are based in the United States. The spokesperson confirmed the incident also affects some U.S. customers.
Rituals did not describe the nature of the cyberattack and the company said its investigation was underway to understand how the data breach happened.
The cosmetics giant is the latest retailer to have customer membership data stolen in the past year, following a string of intrusions at U.K. grocery and shopping chain Co-op and Marks & Spencer, among others. Customer records can be attractive targets for hackers who steal the data and extort the company for a ransom in exchange for not publishing the information online.
When reached with questions about the incident, a Rituals spokesperson declined to comment on whether the company received any communication from the hackers, to share a more precise timeline of the breach, or to provide the exact number of affected members, citing unspecified “security reasons.”
According to its website, Rituals has over 41 million customers in its membership database. The retail giant made €2.4 billion euros ($2.8 billion) in revenue in 2025.
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Tech
Rivian R2 production has started despite tornado damage to factory
Rivian has rolled the first customer-ready R2 SUVs off the production line at its factory in Normal, Illinois, just days after it was hit by an EF-1 tornado that tore off part of the roof.
Despite the damage, founder and CEO RJ Scaringe told Bloomberg Television on Wednesday morning that Rivian doesn’t expect any delays to the R2’s rollout, which is crucial to the company’s survival.
“The tornado went through the south end of the plant, and ripped the roof off the building, and knocked down some of the plant as well, and so the last 72 hours have been around the clock,” he said. Scaringe explained that Rivian has had to change how and where it brings some materials into the factory to build the R2.
But “we’re not making any changes to the plan,” he said, referring to the company’s production roadmap.
Scaringe wasn’t asked when Rivian will make the first R2 deliveries during the interview. The company has previously said it will start shipping R2 SUVs before the first half of 2026 comes to an end.
Getting the R2 into production is a major milestone for the company. It’s the first production vehicle Rivian has made that has a chance to reach mass-market customers, as it costs far less than the company’s current R1 EVs. It’s also supposed to help the company finally reach profitability after years of losing money on every vehicle it sold.
The company has big expectations for the R2. Rivian told investors earlier this year that it expects to deliver between 20,000 and 25,000 of the SUVs by the end of 2026. If Rivian achieves that, it would become one of the fastest-scaling new EVs ever launched in the U.S., second only to Tesla’s Model Y.
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That said, Rivian is launching with a version of the R2 that costs nearly $13,000 more than the $45,000 price tag the company spent years promoting. The launch edition R2 starts at $57,990, with a slightly cheaper $53,990 variant coming by the end of this year. Rivian won’t sell an R2 for under $50,000 until the first half of 2027, and a true base model starting at $45,000 won’t hit the market until late 2027.
And that’s if the $45,000 R2 ever arrives at all. When Rivian announced pricing for the SUV in March, the company said the base model price will start “around $45,000” — not “at $45,000” as it had promoted on its website as recently as February.
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