It's good that you asked in Linear Algebra And Group Theory, because we're going to need some algebra you likely have never seen (unless you went to college) to answer it.
Multiplication isn't one thing. What multiplication is depends on what you're multiplying. Algebra is how we define this.
In Algebra, there are a handful of different kinds of structures. Here, we're interested in Groups, Rings, and Fields. Rings and Fields are kind of made of Groups, so we'll start there.
Say we have a set (the lay concept of set will work fine for our purposes), and we'll call it S.
On this set, we need to define a rule called a "binary relation" that takes any two things in the set and gives some output. We want this set to be closed under this relation, so the relation can only give us things that are already in the set. For this combination of set and relation (for now, we'll use ? to denote the relation) to be a Group, they need to have the following properties:
1) Associativity: for any three things a, b, and c in the set, the relation doesn't care about where the parentheses go. a?(b?c)=(a?b)?c
2) Identity: there is a special thing in the set (traditionally denoted by e when talking abstractly) where, for any other thing a in the set, a?e=e?a=a
3) Invertability: for any thing a in the set, there is another thing in the set a* where a?a*=e=a*
That's enough to be a Group. But we want a special kind of Group, called an Abelian Group. That's just a regular Group that has an extra property:
4) Commutativity: for any two things a and b in the set, a?b=b?a
Tradition dictates that for Abelian Groups, + is used in place of ? and 0 is used in place of e and -a in place of a*. If a Group is not Abelian, we often use × (or nothing at all) in place of ? and 1 in place of e and 1/a in place of a*.
If S is the set, we write (S, +) or (S, ×) for the group, but we often just write S if it is clear from the context that we're talking about a group.
This is enough to let us build a Ring.
With Rings, we still have a set S, but we have two relations. (S, +) is an Abelian Group, but × is a bit more lax. × only has to satisfy two properties:
1) Identity, and
2) Distributivity: for any three things a, b, and c in S, a×(b+c)=(a×b)+(a×c)
Like how (S, ?) is a Group, (S, +, ×) is a Ring.
If a Ring is commutative and has inverses for each relation, then the Ring is called a Field.
There are four particularly important facts mentioned above that are important to why a negative times a negative is a positive:
1) a+(-a)=0,
2) a+0=a,
3) a×0=0 (not mentioned above, but still important), and
4) a×(b+c)=(a×b)+(a×c)
Proof -a×-b = a×b:
Let a and b be positive numbers in our field (S, +, ×).
0=b+(-b)=a(b+(-b))
-a×-b = (-a×-b) + a(b+(-b)) = -a×-b + a×b + a×-b = -a×-b + a×-b + a×b = -b×a + -b×-a +a×b = -b(a+(-a)) + a×b = a×b
TL;DR:
It's because Fields are commutative, have identities, and are distributive