A story in The Register reveals “a security lapse at Kaspersky has exposed a wealth of proprietary information about the anti-virus provider’s products and customers, according to a blogger, who posted screen shots and other details.”

I consider it no big deal to hear about any given hack of any given computer security website — no matter how deep it may strike. Indeed, longtime readers will recall this site got hacked last year and sister site Vmyths got hacked in the early 2000s. It happens, folks.

It happens to the best of ’em for any number of reasons. Maybe your firm scaled up to an unfamiliar new web server package. Or maybe you acquired a tiny company with a poorly managed website. Or maybe you forgot about the default security settings after installing a blog feature on your website. Or maybe your hosting provider got hacked and hundreds of your neighbors got defaced along with you…

Ah! But then The Register lobbed a grenade at my opinion:

“Assuming the hack is for real, it wouldn’t be the first time a Kaspersky site has been hit by a SQL injection attack. In July, Kaspersky’s Malaysian site and several sub­domains were defaced by hacker who left pro-Turkish slogans. Accor­ding to ZDNet’s Zero Day blog here, Zone-h archives show 36 web­site deface­ments of inter­national Kaspersky sites since 2000…”

Hey, I can snicker at the irony of any one hack — but 36 37? This number borders on the absurd. It would average out to four hacks per year against Kaspersky’s websites.

It would skew the num­bers if Kasper­sky suffered a mass-deface­ment and Zone-H logged each server as a separate incident…

Ah! But did you notice where it said “Kaspersky’s Malaysian site and several sub­domains were defaced”? I immediately wondered if a cluster of web servers got hacked in a single mass-defacement. Such an event would only count as one incident in my book … yet Zone-H might have logged each defacement separately, thereby skewing the numbers.

Unfortunately, the Zone-H website doesn’t respond right now (did they shut down?) and it’ll take some time to plow through the Wayback Machine. I’ll give Kaspersky the benefit of the doubt until someone analyzes their defacement history.

So until then, let’s all enjoy a glass of lemonade and snicker at the irony of Kaspersky’s latest hack.