[pja]

At the very least, you use up the particular 0-day attacks you used to gain access to the system - since they had to keep re-using them in order to re-infect machines over reboots there was a pretty high chance that once detected, Kaspersky would discover the exploits being used. Apart from entities like the NSA themselves you probably couldn’t choose a more security aware target.

Any large nation state probably has a nice cache of 0-days ready to roll out at any given time, but they’re still a limited resource that could be used to attack other targets. Attacking Kaspersky pretty much guarantees that the 0-days are blown once the infiltration is discovered.