legal
MeetingTV wants to see the evidence
MeetingTV has sued Palo Alto Networks after its newly acquired Koi Security threat-intelligence biz published a blog that linked the video conferencing and webinar startup to a Chinese corporate espionage operation.The legal complaint filed against Koi Security, its researchers, and Palo Alto Networks alleges that Koi used an LLM to generate the threat report, the AI system hallucinated findings about MeetingTV, and the security shop then published those as facts in a December 30 blog. It accuses Koi of “reckless publication of an AI-driven cybersecurity report that falsely accused Plaintiff MeetingTV Inc. of criminal conduct including operating core infrastructure for a well-funded Chinese criminal organization running a large-scale malware and corporate espionage campaign,” according to court documents [PDF].
“The false attributions were the direct product of Koi’s unsupervised reliance on their proprietary ‘Wings’ analytical platform, which generated erroneous correlations between the Plaintiff’s business and an alleged cybercriminal actor they called DarkSpectre,” the lawsuit continues.
A Palo Alto Networks spokesperson told The Register that the company “is aware of the lawsuit brought by MeetingTV Inc. regarding a threat research report published by Koi Security prior to the acquisition,” but declined to answer our specific questions about MeetingTV’s allegations and the Koi blog. “We believe Koi’s cybersecurity research reflects its commitment to identifying and exposing threats to users and enterprises, and we expect that this dispute will be resolved through the appropriate legal process,” the spokesperson said. Koi’s blog, which has since been silently edited to remove references to MeetingTV’s product called Zoomcorder, originally labeled the meeting recording service as a “public-facing front” for a Chinese criminal operation and said it lent “credibility to the infrastructure while serving as a monetization channel” - allegations MeetingTV disputes in its lawsuit. The blog also claimed the operation was behind a 2.2-million-user campaign stealing corporate meeting intelligence.As a result of the report, MeetingTV says, security companies and service providers around the globe blocked MeetingTV’s domains and services, labeling it as malware and command-and-control infrastructure.The startup’s founder and CEO, longtime entrepreneur Michael Robertson, told us the blocks are the only way he found out about the Koi report in the first place. According to Robertson, Koi did not reach out to MeetingTV prior to publishing its threat report.“Even after publishing they never contacted us,” he told The Register. “I was contacting the security companies one by one asking them to unlock us. Most never respond in any fashion, but one finally did respond and told us he was blocking us because of the Koi report and he gave us the url.”
