>There's no evidence that they have any back-doors in their software or any ties to the Russian mafia or state...

It’s just to happen that an NSA spy contractor was detected by an anti virus software that’s basically doing its job.

All AV software are technically malware to prevent other malwares, and old AV -including kaspresky, used to operate in an offline manner unless you update the local db, then things evolved to the need to have a cloud service to upload and analyze new suspicious files, in fact, the new ones -EDR- do more intensive tasks than AV by real time monitoring what the user does, analyzing the traffic, programs opened, forensics, and data collection for further analysis and immediately uploaded to the cloud (or the MDR), that’s part of its design, banning something because it did its job detecting a spy software IS a complete FUD only to happen that the business is in X country or an allegation that its CEO or founder worked in X.

If you are serious about security, using windows to start with shouldn’t be your first choice, but if you have no options in here and you have to use an AV, would you choose an AV made in the same country you are in (or in the same intelligence alliance like the 5 eyes/14 eyes), or would you choose an external one how you usually do with a VPN for example? At the end of the day, AV or even EDR it’s just another software that can be bypassed, exploited, and even targeted with zero day attacks, so base your personal policy about these facts and not outsourcing yours to NSA or some spy agency.