Antivirus provider Kaspersky said it has designed its products to detect all malware, even if it's sponsored by the National Security Agency or other government entities under programs espoused to target terrorists or other threats.

"We have a very simple and straightforward policy as it relates to the detection of malware: We detect and remediate any malware attack, regardless of its origin or purpose," officials with the Moscow-based company wrote in a statement issued Wednesday. "There is no such thing as 'right' or 'wrong' malware for us."

The officials went on to cite Kaspersky researchers' track record in helping to uncover Flame and Gauss, two pieces of highly advanced, state-sponsored malware that infected thousands of computers, mostly in Iran and other Middle Eastern countries. The officials also recounted their efforts to detect espionage malware that targets human rights advocates and political dissidents.

The statement comes two weeks after the Electronic Frontier Foundation and two-dozen other individuals or groups sent AV companies an open letter urging them to protect their users against malware spawned by groups that carry out government surveillance. The letter came amid recent revelations that the NSA has a wide-ranging menu of software exploits at its disposal that has been used to identify users of the Tor anonymity service, track iPhone users, and monitor the communications of surveillance targets. The senders' concern is that AV companies may voluntarily cooperate with these programs by engineering their programs not to detect state-sponsored malware.

"It's imperative that these surveillance tools do not fall into the wrong hands, and that’s why the IT security industry can make no exceptions when it comes to detecting malware," Kaspersky went on to say.

Wednesday's statement is the only one we know of to be issued in response to last month's open letter. This post will be updated if other responses are discovered. Still, other AV providers have already pledged not to let state-sponsored malware pass through their products. In 2012, for instance, F-Secure Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen said his company would detect threats even if they were presumed to target rogue nations such as Iran or Sudan.

"We want to detect malware, regardless of its source or purpose," Hypponen wrote in a blog post. "Politics don't even enter the discussion, nor should they. Any malware, even targeted, can get out of hand and cause 'collateral damage' to machines that aren't the intended victim. Stuxnet, for example, spread around the world via its USB worm functionality and infected more than 100,000 computers while seeking out its real target, computers operating the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in Iran. In short, it's our job as an industry to protect computers against malware. That's it."

Update: F-Secure has just posted its response to the open letter. It largely reiterates Hypponen's previous statements by saying the company wouldn't comply with any government request not to detect a specific piece of malware.

"To us, the source of the malware does not come into play when deciding whether to detect malware," CEO Christian Fredrikson wrote in the November 1 letter. "If it's malware, we will protect our customers from it. Our decision-making bols down to a simple question: would our customers want to run this program on their system or not. Obviously the answer for government trojans would be 'No.'"