Monthly Archives: July 2011

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

Er, no. It wasn’t all that long ago, not all that far away, and was in no way connected with Star Wars. As Tony Montana once said, shall we “walk in and start over?”

Ok: Once – ten years ago – in the not-so-far-away city of Prague, the British antivirus magazine Virus Bulletin held its annual conference. In early 2001 the event was going through all the usual planning stages a conference of its sort needs to, and all was going to plan when, suddenly…

… suddenly Helen Martin, the editor-in-chief of the magazine, writes to me and unexpectedly suggests I speak at the conference, and not just to say a few words about this or that, but to give a full-blown keynote presentation. That is, to open the conference in front of an audience of 300+ delegates, made up of some of the brightest minds in the antivirus industry. Well, the renown of Virus Bulletin was quite something even back then. A mention on one of its pages was considered either good luck or good work, but a presentation at one of their gigs – that was simply an honor!

Read more > What the

Hi everyone! Here we are with a where, what, and why.

Macau. One of the two pretty much autonomous Special Administrative Regions of China, the other being Hong Kong.

Here they have their own laws and rules and their own currency, but in casinos it seems they only accept Hong Kong dollars. Talking of casinos… Macau really is the Chinese Las Vegas. It even looks like Vegas – skyscraper luxury hotels, countless garish casinos, where nothing ever closes. Put another way, a concentration of depravity!

To get there, first you need to get to Hong Kong. From there it’s straight from the airport with no passport check 45 minutes on the ferry. Once in Macau it’s 100 yuan ($15) for your visa, and off you go…

Since I got to see nothing there apart from the hotel (we were having a partner conference there), I was able to only take a few photos.

Read more > Macau by night

A little on the business.

It just so happened (how else?!) that our product line and business generally developed in a series of “waves”.

First, from 1997 to the early 2000s, came the “anti-virus engine licensing” wave. Since breaking out into the international market with our products was at first very difficult (affected by our being largely unknown and by prejudices related to our country of origin), we licensed our AV engine to IT security companies  (and did rather well at this!).

The income from our technology sales was spent in the main on development and promotion of our personal products (less attention was paid to the development of corporate products back then) – and this was the second wave (by the end of the 2000s-).

Then, the retail business and and online sales simply “blown up”. Since then,and bringing us up to the current era, the corporate business has finally begun to take off. And this is our third wave.

And now, ladies and gentlemen! Especially those who’ve long been waiting for our new breakthrough in the corporate segment.

Read more > beta-testing in progress

Between June 30 and July 3 we organized our second annual conference bringing together the Russian press, bloggers, government and IT vendors to discuss current topics on the development of the Russian IT and telecoms industries. The focus of the discussions was Internet security issues, and they sparked plenty of heated debate among the participants.

A special feature of this event was its format. Just like last year, when we held the first conference of this type, we decided to go outside the traditional box and not gather folk in a five-star hotel, wear suits and ties, talk formally and pretend to be people we aren’t.

Read more > Kozmo what?

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Italy is famous for (among other things, hmm, let’s see… pasta, scooters, diving footballers, fiery women…!) its supercars, while Russia is famous (besides vodka and bears in the street, of course) for its chess players. Therefore, in Italy we sponsor Scuderia Ferrari, while in Russia we have taken under our guardianship the young (born 1997) and extremely promising chess player Mikhail Antipov. He travels all around the world to take part in tournaments, and this of course entails visas, flights, hotels, etc., which his parents’ resources can’t fully stretch to. So we decided to step in and help out.

Read more > Chess and rugby

All-righty! Here we are with the latest news.

What we have been for ages talking about, explaining, and encouraging, at last is finally showing some signs of actually being put into practice.

A new body – the International Cyber Security Protection Alliance (ICSPA) (news, site)  – has been founded in London: an international non-commercial organization that brings together “governments, international business and law enforcement bodies, including Europol”. The aim of the new organization is simple: to tackle nationalistic narrow-mindedness, unite parochial strengths, and fight cyber-crime on a global level – together.

This is what we’ve been been advocating constantly for more than ten years. It’s impossible to tackle international criminals with traditional methods alone, when every country just thinks of itself, covers its own backside, and the rest of the world can go whistle.

Read more > United we stand

And here we are, with the second in the series of nostalgic tales from the history of the company. As promised, in this installment we are taking you on a journey back to the beginning of the 90s – to the era of good old DOS, and the prototype of our anti-virus, which was used on this early operating system.

Generally my first encounter with viruses came in October 1989. (In just a few months it will be 22 years since that fateful event, and I still don’t know how to celebrate this anniversary!). It all started with someone bringing me a floppy disc (when they actually were floppy!) containing a strange program that caused a bizarre effect of falling characters. I had a look at the program, dug into it, felt around, and eventually cured it. This satisfied me greatly and I was most happy with the result. And I enjoyed the process of doing it too.

I began successfully treating other viruses that kept being brought to me, and soon news about my virus cures spread all around the research institute I was studying at the time. It was around this time that I generally became known as the “the guy who gets rid of viruses”. Then folk with viruses started coming from other departments, then other institutes, and then other cities.

Read more > How many viruses I’ve healed?

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