NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, stated that the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, have worked to undermine the power and authority of anti-virus and other security software, in order to track down users that can gain access to networks.

The NSA and GCHQ are spying on security software companies from various countries and reverse-engineerm their software, to make sure that these programs would not be able to detect their own spying software.

The Moscow based Kaspersky Lab, a security software maker, with a holding registered in the U.K., is also one of the targets of both agencies. Kaspersky Lab has more than 270,000 corporate clients, and the security software maker protects more than 400 million people with its products.

The British spy agency said that the Kaspersky software needed to have some reverse engineering, as the agency viewed the software is an obstruction to its hacking operations but in doing so, the agency needed a warrant.

The GCHQ agency memo stated: "Reverse engineering of commercial products needs to be warranted in order to be lawful," and the agency added: "There is a risk that in the unlikely event of a challenge by the copyright owner or licensor, the courts would, in the absence of a legal authorization, hold that such activity was unlawful[...]"

Reversing or the software reverse engineering collects the techniques of the software, then it will decipher and analyze how a program operates. It is more like observing the flow of data into and out of the program.

The top-secret GHQ warrant renewal request said: "Personal security products such as the Russian anti-virus software Kaspersky continue to pose a challenge to GCHQ's CNE [Computer Network Exploitation] capability and SRE is essential in order to be able to exploit such software and to prevent detection of our activities,"  it also stated: "Examination of Kaspersky and other such products continues."