Last year’s new products – a review; and expect more – in 2022!

The new working year is up and away, cruising steadily and assuredly like… a long-range airliner flying east. Out the window it’s getting brighter: in Moscow daylight has increased by nearly an hour daily since a month ago; in New York – by 40 minutes; and in Reykjavik – by more than two hours. Even in Singapore there’s… one more minute of sunlight in a day compared to a month ago.

However, the year 2021 simply won’t let go! First there was my review of the year (all positive); then there was the 2021 K-patents review (all positive). There’ll be a corporate/financial-results review a bit later (all positive:). And now, here, today – I’ve another review for you!…

Several reviews of a single year? If some of you have had enough of 2021 and want to leave it behind, forget it, and get on with this year, this one’s for you! ->

Actually, you can download the calendar the above pic’s taken from – here (and, jic, what the above pic’s about is here:).

Right, back to that fourth 2021-review…

And it just so happens to be – a professional review, as in: of the product and technological breakthroughs we made throughout our very busy 2021 – and all in the name of protecting you from cyber-evil. But first – some product/tech history…

First steps making (AV) products

Our objective has always been confident calm in the digital world for all – from the elderly receiving cookie recipes from their grandchildren by email, to large enterprises with vast, complex cyber-infrastructure, with security operations centers on steroids and risks of a galactical scale in case of a cyber-break-in.

In the early nineties, we were of course mainly into antivirus for home users and their PCs. We became pretty well-known for this, first in Russia, then around the rest of the world – while I would feel pretty much like a traveling salesman of green boxes. In parallel with home AV, we started producing products for companies – at first aimed at smaller ones (though these products were still essentially just antivirus).

Moving on up

A while later, we started making products and solutions for large, very large and humungous companies. These big boys had correspondingly big cybersecurity requirements – hardly mere antivirus; more like complex, multi-level – world’s best – cyberprotection in the world. Now, some would have gotten to this (top) level and thought – that’s it, time for some cruise-control/auto-pilot. Not us. For it’s in our K-DNA to always develop, no matter how well we’re already doing. After all, resting on laurels in such a fast-developing market as cybersecurity leads to swift business annihilation.

Now what?

Change in our market occurs at breakneck speed. Attacks become smarter, network security – more complex, and the speed at which new computer technologies (also requiring protection) are introduced is hypersonic. Given all this, protecting business today can only be done well using a single corporate platform – one that meets all the needs of customers and that permits realizing all necessary scenarios of security (prevention, detection, investigation, response, and system configuration management) for all types of IT assets in the corporate market.

Such a single corporate platform – aka an ecosystem of cybersecurity – needs to be open to third-party developers and protect everything from the cyber-scum. Its being the best on the market of course would help. And that’s the technology platform of the future we’re aiming for. And we call it the Kaspersky Open Single Management Platform.

10 + 250 = 2021

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s return back from the future to last year…

In 2021 we launched:

• 10 new products/services;
• 250+ large and very large updates for existing products, several of which products became totally different after the updates.

The most groundbreaking of these releases were as follows:

1. Kaspersky Managed Detection and Response (MDR): A solution for the automatic detection and analysis of security incidents in corporate infrastructure, which uses both telemetry and advanced machine learning. In essence, it’s a cyber-paleontology tool that continuously analyses data from endpoints to be able to detect previously unknown attacks in no time at all. Our recent report sheds light on several such previously unknown attacks: with the help of KMDR our customers proactively protected themselves from: (i) attacks via the PrintNightmare vulnerability, (ii) new cyberspying tricks of the espionage group MuddyWater, and (iii) the dumping of login details via LSASS memory, among others. We also introduced Mac support (in addition to Windows and Linux) and added MDR management from a single console (to which we’ve already got connected EDR and Endpoint Security).

2. KUMA. No – not that Kuma ). This Kuma is our Kaspersky Unified Monitoring and Analysis Platform (coming soon to the global market). A key element of our ecosystem, it’s a powerful SIEM-class solution that’s a bit like an air traffic control tower – only for large corporate networks. It collects signals from network devices and applications, processes the data received, detects anomalies, and swiftly warns the cybersecurity experts about an attack. Thus, even if malware somehow manages to get into a network, KUMA quickly pounces on it – before it can cause any damage. And, just like KMDR, KUMA is specially designed for detecting previously unknown attacks. And as if all that wasn’t enough – there’s more: KUMA can not only analyze data from our own products and services (including KATA, Threat Intelligence and KICS), it can analyse data from products of many other developers – including Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, Check Point and Palo Alto Networks.

3. Kaspersky Industrial CyberSecurity (KICS). All things digital found their way into all things factories, manufacturing and assorted other industry long ago. Alas, malware and the cyber-baddies weren’t far behind: and once in – they’ve been fairly running amok. But not to worry – for where the bad guys go, we also go – to clean up all things digital and turn factories into cyber-fortresses. And please excuse my lack of false modesty, but I have to say that the level of technological development in our industrial cybersecurity solutions are waaaaay ahead of the competition: literally none of them provides anything like the level of control over data-security events in industrial networks as we do. In 2021 we reinforced this leadership: thanks to close integration of KICS for Networks and KICS for Nodes, the solution not only detects unauthorized activity by constantly monitoring OT network traffic, it also provides inventory of endpoints for vulnerability management.

PS…

There were a great many other new powerful products, cutting-edge technologies and thematic events in 2021, but I had to draw the line somewhere: if I’d included everything this post would have run into dozens of pages! But, briefly, these included: a (near-)victory in a machine learning security evasion competition (a technicality prevented the win!), products for iOS and home-router protection, technology for detecting personal data in clouds, and much, much more. Thank you to all participating colleagues in these projects, and apologies for not including more info on them here. I’ll get round to it one day )…

So there we have it folks: 2021 was super successful for us also on the product front. And I’m sure products-2022 will be even more so. Stay tuned!…

But for now – back to work!