Nota Bene

Greetings folks!

The other day I visited a most curiously interesting place – and it didn’t take a plane to get me there! Practically on my doorstep – Moscow’s Cryptography Museum, here. And I was reeaally impressed, to say the least: well thought-out, well laid-out, modern/futuristic-looking, and not just for math boffins – accessible for most everyone. In short – an amazing museum. Highly recommended!…

All things cryptography are exhibited at the museum: from ancient coding kit, via the later pre-digital systems, and through to today’s latest cryptographic systems…

Read on…

We had our Global Partner Conference 2023 the other week. And, getting ahead of myself, let me tell you it was a great success!…

Our global partner conferences are one of the most important regular business events for us. They’re where we tell our partner companies (distributors, system integrators, service providers, and so on) from all over the world how our products and services are developing, and how those products and services can help their customers solve the most difficult aspects of cybersecurity all the more. In turn, our partners share with us how their business is growing and changing, what’s happening in their regional markets, what they want more of, and what their customers dream of. Then it’s back to us to tell them what we envision they’ll be wanting in a year’s time, in two years’ time, and in five. And it all looks something like this:

Read on…

It’s been long. It’s been winding. But finally, the (Nepalese) South Base Camp is no longer a long and winding way away: it’s just around the corner! After spending our last night on the trek in spartan surroundings in Gorakshep, we were up and out for our final push to the SBC!…

But once out of our lodgings, I couldn’t quite fathom the eager wonder expressed in the faces of my fellow trekkers. I couldn’t fathom it out since the weather was absolument merde (pardon my French). Ok, so the snow was falling from behind – but we had to come back down again later that day!…

Read on…

Hi folks!

We’ve never been busier, and that goes for the whole of the fateful 2022 and also the first half of this year. Busy as bees we are. And it’s the same for me personally as well as the Kompany: business trips almost back-to-back, with “breathers” in-between back home turning into busy workdays too. But it is what it is, and who am I to complain?…

As per the eternal tradition at K though – in addition to working hard we also play hard. Last Friday we had the annual Kiddies Day at HQ, and soon – in July – we’ll be having our annual K-Birthday all-dayer, back after last year’s omission. While the other day there was some more “play” for me, though I’d hardly call it hard. Still just as fun…

I was in Nizhny Novgorod – on business, of course, but I managed to fit in the mandatory walkabout downtown – specifically, along the city’s famed pedestrianized Bolshaya Pokrovskaya Street – the perfect spot stretch for strolling, eating, drinking, chilling, and assorted other (legal) pastiming…

It seems angels are a thing of late, not only in Belarus but here too!

Read on…

Our trek up to the Nepalese Base Camp of Everest was all but complete, with just a little way still to go –from Gorakshep to the base camp itself. But before we get to the culmination, a brief time-out from all the extreme-trekking for a brief review of all the places we stayed overnight at on our trek. This is just in case you ever – and you really should – decide to give possibly the world’s most unforgettable trek a go for yourself…

I’ll pass on the potential first and last nights of any trek up to the South Base Camp: in Lukla (of world’s craziest airport fame), and in the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu. We didn’t stay overnight in the former, since we began our trek right from the airport (note: not a bad idea for you to copy folks!); and as to the latter – there’s any kind and standard of hotel you could wish for there, so there’s no “inside information” to speak of.

All righty, on to our first overnight stay. It was in Phakding – at the Sherpa Shangri-La Resort:

Read on…

Hi folks!

Herewith, a brief interlude to my series of posts on our trek up to the South Base Camp of Mount Everest. Why? First, so you don’t get overloaded with all things Nepalese extreme-trekking; second, to keep you waiting for the best bit – finally getting to the Base Camp (which is just around the corner!); and third, because something unexpected occurred the other week that’s perfectly intermission-worthy: I scored myself a +1 to my list of countries I’ve visted in the world. And it’s hard to believe, but that country… was Belarus!

We were in Minsk for just half a day: I gave a lecture at the Belarusian State University (on the latest cyber-maliciousness and our cyber-poison against it, followed by a Q&A/AMA session), then there were a few important business meetings, and after that we hit the road and headed out into the Belarusian countryside for an ambitious (as in “would we have time to fit everything in?”) two-and-a-half-day round trip to: oversized dump-truck manufacturer BelAZ, then to the Pripyatsky National Park (strolling, snapping), from there to the famed Belovezhskaya Pushcha Forest (more strolling, more snapping), and then back to Minsk to grab our suitcases and back to the airport. Thus, all as per: intense, chock-full business-then-pleasure!

My main impression from the whole trip: an unexpectedly astonishingly positive one based on practically everything we saw there. Minsk is a remarkably smart, elegant city. We only drove through other cities and towns, but they too appeared to be neat and graceful. Even villages were clean, freshly painted and neatly trimmed!…

The first two pics below were taken from my hotel room in Minsk. Elsewhere things were a little less polished, but still most pleasant and easy on the eyes:

Read on…

Hi all,

I’ve some big news about a cyber-incident we’ve uncovered…

Our experts have discovered an extremely complex, professional targeted cyberattack that uses Apple’s mobile devices. The purpose of the attack is the inconspicuous placing of spyware into the iPhones of employees of at least our company – both middle and top management.

The attack is carried out using an invisible iMessage with a malicious attachment, which, using a number of vulnerabilities in the iOS operating system, is executed on a device and installs spyware. The deployment of the spyware is completely hidden and requires no action from the user. The spyware they quietly transmits private information to remote servers: microphone recordings, photos from instant messengers, geolocation, and data about a number of other activities of the owner of the infected device.

Despite the attack being carried out as discreetly as possible, the infection was detected by the Kaspersky Unified Monitoring and Analysis Platform (KUMA) – a native SIEM solution for security information and event management; the system detected an anomaly in our network coming from Apple devices. Further investigation by our team showed that several dozen iPhones of senior employees were infected with new, extremely technologically sophisticated spyware we’ve dubbed “Triangulation”.

Read on…

The “Long” in the title is spot on – we’d already been on our trek up to the Nepalese Base Camp of Mount Everest a full week – and we’d still a few days to go. And it was those few last days that worried me a little when I opened the curtains in my guesthouse room early on this morning. Now, of course, I’m no stranger to snow and fog, but I’m used to having to directly experience it just between my front door and that of my car, and between said car and office door. However, here… – yikes: we had a day’s trekking with low oxygen (from Lobuche to the next village of Gorakshep) – upward – out in this! ->

It made me want to go back down to the snooker hall and lay low there instead of forge ahead )…

I was comforted a little when I learned we had just four kilometers to cover this day, but still – this weather: what the actual fog?!

Read on…

So far – so snooker…

• Day 1a: flying in to Lukla’s bonkers airport
• Day 1b: setting off on our trek from Lukla to Phakding
• Day 2: Phakding to Namche Bazaar
• Day 3: acclimatization day in Namche Bazaar
• Day 4: Namche Bazaar to Deboche
• Day 5: Deboche to Dingboche

And so on to day 6…

Setting out in the morning in Deboche we were at an altitude of 4400 meters above sea-level. Come evening we’d be at 4900m – in the small settlement called Lobuche, which sits upon a mountain of the same name. Ahead of us on this day were snow and fog, but earlier the weather and thus visibility weren’t so bad:

All the same – not quite up to what could have been: here’s the same scene on a brighter day, as depicted in a large framed photo on the wall in our guesthouse. Notice there’s even light cloud in the photo: I’m thinking cloud is inevitable high in the Himalayas – even on the best of days weather-wise… ->

Read on…

One of the cultural shocks on our trek up to the Base Camp of Mount Everest was our seeing a snooker hall/club practically every day in a village we passed through or stayed at – no matter how small the village! (Just in case you’re not sure what snooker is – it’s a cue sport, kind of like billiards or pool.) Even in Dingboche, some 4400 meters above sea-level, there was a “Sherpa’s Kitchen & Bar” with snooker! Extraordinary. So extraordinary that I just had to find out a little more about this unanticipated Nepalese “tradition”…

In all I saw four snooker-playing establishments on our trek. The first one was in Lukla, where we landed (at the world’s craziest airport), on its main street:

The second time was in a small village not far from Namche Bazaar – the same village as where the supposed scalp of the Yeti is exhibited (in a Buddhist monastery):

Still not quite believing my eyes, I decided to go check up on the presence of an actual snooker table inside. And there one was. Full size too…

The green baize has seen better days, but it’s still perfectly usable:

// In Namche Bazaar itself I only saw a pool (not snooker) table (they’re smaller).

The next snooker hall we saw was in Pangboche. And that was at just under 4000 meters above sea-level ->

But the record was at 4400 meters in Dingboche – and as full-size and genuine and proper as all the rest!…

// Btw: what’s wrong in the above photo?

Sherpas in action:

And they turned out to be the Sherpas who’d just carried up our luggage and that of another group…

Remember – no transportation at all around here. Imagine the job they had getting this colossus all the way up here?!!

So, just how did snooker come to be so popular in the Nepalese mountains (and valleys, I guess). Some seem to think it’s down to the fact it was invented in next-door India by British Army officers in the mid-19^th century; others reckon it’s only just gotten real big over the last ten years.

Sherpa-snooker in the Himalayas reminded me of another cultural shock in an indiginoius peoples’ village in Paraguay in 2006. Here are my travelogue notes from back then:

“Excursion along the Paraná River, which separates Paraguay from Argentina. Fun! We got out on the Paraguayan bank and were taken to a museum of an explorer. If lucky, you get taken a few kilometers further through jungle to a village of indigenous Paraguayans. Everything’s just like in the movies: short in height, traditional dress and body paintings, huts, lots of children, and… a soccer pitch! [that’s just the culture-shock hors d’oeuvres!] They offered to play music. We agreed they should; and out comes – a harp, which an elder proceeded to play eloquently! Culture shock! Guaraní + harp!”

And that’s all for today folks. Back in Nepal we were headed further – in an upward direction. But more on that later…

The rest of the photos from our trek up to the Base Camp of Mount Everest are here.