Brazilian partner conference – and carnival, <em>naturalmente</em>! | Nota Bene: Eugene Kaspersky’s Official Blog

Another day – another continent!…

Country: Brazil.
City: Rio de Janeiro
Main business: our regional (the Americas; these days mostly Latin American) partner conference
Secondary activity: tourisms – of course!…

First up – the partner ~~conference~~ carnival. It wasn’t in Rio city itself, but a bit outside – in a beach suburb; still Rio though. I’d been here a couple of times before, but that was ages ago. The first time was in 2006; the second in 2010 – and on both occasions the reason I was here was for… you ~~won’t~~ will believe it: regional partner conferences!

Back then, I didn’t bother with detailed stories and lots photos (that got started properly in 2011), so I can’t compare today’s experience with that from 19 and 15 years ago, alas.

On the morning of our arrival, with a few hard days’ work ahead, we start out with breakfast looking out onto the South Atlantic Ocean – and a seemingly endless traffic jam:

Curiously, by 9:30am the traffic had cleared up to become a comfortable trickle of vehicles…

There’s the tail-end of the vanishing traffic jam – surely a sign that this was a day that would go smoothly (made all the more optimistic by Duran Duran’s Rio in my head all this morning!) ->

Yes, I agree – the waves aren’t particularly friendly. Sometimes they knock you over and tumble you around – but that’s no reason not to take a dip!

Also, for some reason, the local “pterodactyls” were perched on every single pole along the road. What’s with that performance? I’ve no idea…

So to business – to our United Americas Partner Conference 2025:

Almost everyone showed up – only two seats were left empty in the hall ->

Let me repeat: we host a string of conferences every year around the world practically one after the other: one global partner conference – for our absolute top-performing partner companies, and then regional conferences: the Americas, the Middle East & Africa, Asia, and Russia (the Russian one took place without me this time). In Europe we don’t do partner conferences now for obvious geopolitical reasons…

Here’s our director for the Americas kicking things off after my introductory words:

We “energize” our partners in several directions – products, technology, and new offers to boost their businesses:

We explain how AI is changing the game in battling global cyber-evil:

Regarding AI, there was good and bad news. The bad: the cyber-swine are using AI more and more for their gain; the good: we started investing in AI-enhanced security 20 years ago!

…And the result – unrivaled technologies, products, and services. And as a result of that – stellar financial results!

“We’re not just a software company anymore” ->

Also a unique offering on the market: checking open-source projects for trojan backdoors. We’ve already found roughly 14,000 (!) trojanized open-source codes!

Nearly 200 guests from 19 countries came to the event. The longest flight to the conference took 26 hours; the shortest journey was a 10-minute Uber ride :)

The event was conducted in three languages: English, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish. Naturally, synchronous translation was a must.

We had a few technical-organizational issues…

A generator burned out during the welcome dinner, and the video capture board during a presentation glitched real bad (no doubt from the vibrance of the content being presented:). But the most bizarre was the control crew (slide management, music, microphones, etc.) we hired for the event turning out to be utterly incompetent during the rehearsal: they were promptly ~~sent back to the~~ ~~favela~~ fired, and we had to urgently find replacements!

Here’s a pic of AI (not Artificial Intelligence, but my colleague, Alexander I.:) trying to explain the basics of such events to the control-crew “pros”: