Most everything’s strange this year. A lot’s been cancelled, a lot’s been changed, a lot’s been postponed, some things have been transformed into different formats… And Formula 1 racing hasn’t been spared either; still, at least it hasn’t been canceled this year: it’s still going strong, and still… as incredibly awesome as ever!

I won’t dwell on our team’s poor results. A hundred reasons will always be found for a losing streak – but I’ll leave that to others to discuss. All I’ll say is that this really strange year has been a really strange one for Ferrari too.

The strangest thing of all this year for F1 is that the stands are completely empty, and I really do mean completely! Not a single spectator to be seen the whole season. I should know – I was at the Turkish Grand Prix recently ->

Strange year, strange F1, and here, now – strange post!…

Read on…

This blogpost could pass as an advertisement, if it were paid for; however, it’s being published entirely voluntarily and gratis. Basically, in it, I’ll be telling you the fascinating story of 11 fearless females on an Arctic expedition up to the North Pole!…

So, what happened was that our good old friend Felicity Aston, the dauntlessly adventuresome (see why we’re good old friends?:) British explorer, whose unique Antarctic expeditions we support and sponsor from time to time (I’ve even been known to piggy-back onto one of her missions (I flew, she skied!) – to see in the New Year at the South Pole!), decided to steel herself to… try something totally different: to write a new book about one of her adventures! And the one she chose was the first international skiing expedition to the North Pole, in which only women took part, with around half of the skiers coming from Arab countries – so the only snow/ice they’d ever seen was the bit you get in the fridge-freezer (ok, maybe also at the skiing attraction in Dubai:).

https://www.instagram.com/p/CDbuiqelYaN/

Officially it was the Euro-Arabian North Pole expedition, which took place back in 2018. But in the book it’s less the official side – more the human side… For it’s not only about conquering the North Pole; it’s also about how the team of women built up comradery and dialogue amid vast expanses of ice and snow, the negotiating of dangerous ice cracks, and also endless daytime where it never gets dark and spending those light nights in cramped tents, and more uniquely ‘polar’ circumstances.

This printed work will be called ‘Polar Exposure’, and just recently Felicity announced the start of its pre-sales. Click here, and you can pre-order a copy!

Now for a bit more detail on the North Pole expedition…

Eleven women took part in the polar expedition, most of whom had no experience whatsoever of anything like it, but under the expert guidance of Felicity they successfully fulfilled their mission: getting to the North Pole on foot and skis only. Some were their countries’ first ever women to set foot on Arctic ice! And despite the extreme temperatures, icy winds and lots of other hardships, the expeditioners completed their tough route in eight days. The expedition, organized by Felicity, and with our full sponsorship-support, showed how much women, no matter where they’re from in the world and regardless of experience, can achieve (given the right guidance) – even to ski across the ice of the Arctic Ocean and to the very top of the planet!

So sure – buy the book, by all means. But also, perhaps – then buy… some skis! Find the right travel agency with experience of Arctic skiing treks, organize yourselves, train, and then follow in the 11 heroes’ footsteps ski tracks – all the way up to the North Pole! Well why not? Life’s too short not to!…

Btw, pre-ordering the book will be possible through November 14. And if there are at least 500 pre-orders, the launch and the distribution of the book will be taken care of by the publisher. And the more pre-orders – the better the distribution terms, the bigger the print-run, and simply the more positivity and drive there’ll be in this world!

Happy reading folks. And then happy polar expeditioning!…

The other day I visited a most unusual, unique place – and just down the road too. It’s a space-travel training complex where they do simulations of long missions into space. You may have heard of a small group of volunteers who cut themselves off from the world for a long as it takes to fly to Mars and back? Well, this is the place where that happens…

…In this unassuming building:

…Namely – inside cylindrical chambers like the one in the following pic, whose size is no larger than that of a modern-day space ship. Inside everything’s set up to imitate as closely as possible a space flight: limited space, regeneration of water and oxygen, time delays in communications ‘with Earth’, etc. The only thing that’s not reproduced is weightlessness; oh – and windows through which you can see stars ).

Read on…

There’s a town in Russia that’s situated almost precisely at the mid-point between Moscow and St. Petersburg. It goes by the name of Udomlya. You’ll no doubt not have heard of it. Not many Russians have heard of it; I hadn’t heard of it either until last week when we went there! For I don’t have an encyclopedic memory, and I tend to study geography through personal field visits!

So what were we doing in this little-known town? Well, just to the north of Udomlya there’s a lake of the same name, and on one of its banks is a place to which we paid a visit: the Kalinin Nuclear Power Plant.

// You think Udomlya sounds a little funny/stage in English? It sounds no less funny/strange in Russian! I had a quick look on the net for the etymology, and it claims it comes from the Finno-Ugric, but to me it sounds Slavic. Can any of you, dear readers, confirm the origins?

Now, much as I’d love to show you pics of this fascinating industrial installation, I’m not going to show you one! I didn’t take any! (Blimey: that must be a first.) For this is critical infrastructural object – no photography allowed, not by visitors at least. Some of the nice folks who showed us round – they were permitted to take photos, but even then – only in special designated areas. Accordingly, you’ll just have to settle for their handful of pics (and this here short text of mine)…

Read on…

Hot off the presses folks – coming up in a matter of minutes (!) – the next in the Hacker:HUNTER series of online documentaries on cybercrime! And timely it is: it’s about how, during the pandemic, hackers have been exploiting the situation to steal ever more data and money more than before. And they’ve been exploiting the fact that most folks have been working from home too. But wait – they go even lower…

Since the pandemic really kicked in, cybercriminals have been hacking and causing all sorts of trouble for medical institutions and research centers. Some cyber-scum having been searching for get-rich-quick schemes (and often finding them), while others – the more sophisticated groups – have been hunting today’s most valuable medical research information. And our new documentary – Hacker:Hunter: Ha(ck)c1ne – Healthcare on the Edge! – is all about this.

The film shows us how, against the backdrop of coronavirus, the devoted, selfless, hardworking folks working to save lives became targets of super-advanced cyberattacks, while those seeking data on vaccines against COVID-19 have been turning to cybercriminals to pilfer it.

The film is the third season of the series of investigative documentaries about cybercrime – Hacker:HUNTER, released as part of our Tomorrow Unlocked online project.

The first was all about the Carbanak cybercriminal group, which several years ago managed to steal a billion dollars from ATMs in different countries around the world.

The second told the story of the infamously awful WannaCry ransomware attack.

The series is getting really good reviews too, with high IMDB ratings. So, if you’ve seen everything worth watching while spending a lot more time at home than usual, here’s something new for you – here!

And the premiere is, like minutes away – 15:00 GMT (16:00 BST – current UK time).

You can watch the film on our YouTube channel.

Meanwhile – trailer! ->

If you’ll have questions at the end, they can be put to the creators and technical experts of the film: Rainer Bock, Head of Production at our Brand Activation Studio; and Costin Raiu, GReAT director and one of the main consultants for the film.

Btw: for the wittiest, most interesting post on the film – a prize of a 100-euro voucher will be awarded! (the post needs to include a link to the YouTube premiere and the hashtag #hackc1ne), while the author of the most popular publication will be awarded a collection of corporate souvenirs!

So – quickly – go get the popcorn in, and then settle down comfortably and enjoy the film! I promise you it’ll be worth it!..

Business done successfully will always tend toward becoming bigger. C’est la vie.

It often goes like this: In a given field, the big and strong gobble up the small and… smart (exceptions prove the rule). But what also sometimes happens is the big and strong with breakthrough technologies in one field gobble up everyone in different field. Example: once upon a time there was the giant, all-powerful Kodak, but then the era of digital photography came along, and the film-based photography field was wiped out. And this is how scientific-technical revolutions come about, and they’re useful: they help humanity progress.

But there’s another scenario: the big and strong become… so incredibly big and strong that they start dictating rules to all the other players in their industry, they strangle the natural selection of innovative and successful companies, and even try to hamper the development of any allied companies or markets that represent potential danger for their business. And in this case, antimonopoly bodies have to intervene to put a stop to such abuse of power so as to protect progress.

This latter scenario is being played out right now on a (socially-distanced) stage in a suspenseful IT-show whose main characters are Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google – operators of the world’s largest online platforms – three of which (all bar Facebook) also act as the world’s largest online marketplaces. The other main characters in the show are the U.S. authorities, which are trying to rein in these online platforms – meaning checking they’re not unfairly taking advantage of their powerful positions – including hindering their ability to be judge, jury and executioner in their marketplaces. They are trying to prevent unfair competition – including exertion of pressure on competitors to ease promotion of the marketplaces’ own products. I’ve already written about one such high profile show case like this: the one where Apple has been driving out independent developers of parental control applications from its App Store.

Let me give an analogy here:

A landlord starts to lease out his land to farmers on equal terms and conditions, which suit everyone just fine. But at the same time, the landlord keeps a close watch on the farmers to see which are doing best. The following year, he starts doing what those successful farmers do himself. He also changes the terms and conditions of the leases ‘to protect worms’: now all farmers under those leases aren’t allowed to use spades – they must use trowels, and they should stop using fertilizer. But this rule doesn’t apply to the landlord. It’s like, he’s not actually preventing the farmers from going about their farming business – and he’s declaring worthy intentions – but how on earth can the farmers with trowels compete with the landlord with his spades and the very latest fertilizer?

Sounds all very Middle Ages, right? But a similar thing is happening in 2020 – only not in farming but in the modern digital economy; however, finally, the powers-that-be appear to be waking up to the fact. Or so it seems…

In early 2019, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren gave a watershed interview to The Verge, in which she stated that she “would classify any company that runs a marketplace and makes more than $25 billion a year in revenue as a ‘platform utility’, and prohibit those companies from using those platforms from [sic] selling their own products.” Put simpler – incidentally when referring to Apple in particular – she stated: “Either they run the platform or they play in the store”.

And that was that: despite the fact these were Very Big Boys she was talking about, the starting gun was duly fired…

Read on…

We’ve done it again! For the second time we’re in the Derwent Top 100 Global Innovators – a prestigious list of global companies that’s drawn up based on their patent portfolios. I say prestigious, as on the list we’re rubbing shoulders with companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Symantec and Tencent; also – the list isn’t just a selection of seemingly strong companies patents-wise: it’s formed upon the titanic analytical work of Clarivate Analytics, which sees it evaluate more than 14,000 (!) candidate companies on all sorts of criteria, of which the main one is citation rate, aka ‘influence’. And as if that wasn’t tough enough, in five years the threshold requirement for inclusion in the Top-100 on this criterion has risen some 55%:

In a bit more detail, the citation rate is the level of influence of inventions on the innovations of other companies. For us, it’s how often we’re mentioned by other inventors in their patents. And to be formally mentioned in another company’s patent means you’ve come up with something new and genuinely innovative and helpful, which aids their ‘something new and genuinely innovative and helpful’. Of course, such an established system of acknowledging other innovators – it’s no place for those who come up with mere BS patents. And that’s why none of those come anywhere near this Top-100. Meanwhile, we’re straight in there – in among the top 100 global innovator companies that genuinely move technological progress forward.

Wow, that feels good. It’s like a pat on the back for all our hard work: true recognition of the contributions we’ve been making. Hurray!

Still reeling – glowing! – from all this, ever the curious one, I wondered which, say, five, of our patented technologies are the most cited – the most influential. So I had a look. And here’s what I found…

5^th place – 160 citations: US8042184B1 – ‘Rapid analysis of data stream for malware presence’.

Read on…

The first few years after the founding of the company were the toughest of all because we really had to put the hours in, aka, bust our asses. It was like we were compressing a spring for it only later to be released to take the company up high and far beyond the horizon and in the right direction of pipe dreams (be careful what you have pipe dreams of:). After the formal registration of KL in 1997, with very little we did an awful lot. We had no money and hardly any resources, but the cybersecurity conveyor waits for no one: new technologies were needed, and the market demanded new products. So we toiled and slogged, working most weekends, and with hardly ever a vacation. So what were we working on? Here’s an example…

June 1998: the global Chernobyl (CIH) virus epidemic. All the other AV companies either didn’t notice it or didn’t bother with it, or were on vacation; we were almost the only one with a product that not only caught, but also cured systems infected with this pathogen. The www (i.e., already not just Runet:) was dotted with links to our site. That’s how we were rewarded for our super-speedy reactions to new threats – that and our ability to launch quick updates with procedures for treatment of specific threats. While this specific virus-threat incredibly craftily installed itself into Windows memory, hooked file-access calls, and infected executable files – all of which required a custom-designed dissection process that would have been impossible to deliver without flexible functionality of updates.

So – tough: yes; but we were getting results and growing. And then, two months later, we received a helping hand (of fate?!) of the most unexpected kind…

August 1998: the Russian financial crisis, featuring devaluation of the ruble, plus Russia defaulting on its debt. It was bad for most Russians on the whole, but we were reeeaaal lucky: all our foreign partners paid us in advance in foreign currency. We were an exporter. Our operating/working currency – a heavily devalued ruble; our income – dollars, pounds sterling, yen, etc. We were in the money!

But we didn’t rest on our ‘lucky’ laurels amid the financial crisis. We used the period also to take on new, professional – expensive! – managers. Soon we had commercial, technical and finance directors. And a little later we started to take on mid-level managers too. This was our first ever ‘restructuring‘ – when the ‘team’ became a ‘company’; when friendly, organic relations were replaced by a more formal organizational structure, subordination and accountability. The restructuring could have been painful; thankfully it wasn’t: we just got on with it without too much nostalgia for the old family-like times.

// For all about this kind of reorganization-restructuring-‘reengineering’ – I highly recommend the book Reengineering the Corporation by Michael Hammer and James Champy. It’s a real good one. Other useful books – here.

In 1999 we opened our first foreign office – in Cambridge in the UK. But, like, what with the British market being perhaps one of the toughest to crack for foreigners, why there? Actually, it was kinda just by chance (I’ll tell you how below). Still, we had to start somewhere, and anyway, our first experiences – including many mistakes and lessons learned – in the UK helped in making development of the business in other countries run a lot smoother…

Our first ever press tour took place in London, as we were in the British capital anyway for an IT security conference (InfoSecurity Europe). On that press tour we proudly announced our intention of opening an office in the UK. But the journalists would simply ask why, given that there were already Sophos, Symantec, McAfee and so on already comfortably established in the country. So we switched to geek mode: we told them all about how our company was a truly innovative one, and all about our unique technologies and products and how – because of them – we’re better than all the competition they’d just mentioned. All this was noted with much surprised interest (and another bonus: ever since then really silly questions have never been asked of us!). Meanwhile, at InfoSecurity Europe I gave my first ever speech to an English-speaking audience made up of… two journalists, who turned out to be from our friends at Virus Bulletin who already knew plenty about us! Still, that was the first – and last – time any of our presentations weren’t full-house (btw: details – here).

As regards our first ever partner conference, here’s how that came about..

Some time in the winter of 1998-1999 we were invited to the partner conference of our OEM partner F-Secure (Data Fellows). And that’s how we learned about the whole partner-conference format and what a great idea it is: to gather everyone together, share all the latest information about technologies and products, to hear out partners’ concerns and problems, and to discuss new ideas. Not ones to hang about – within a year (in 1999) we put on our own partner conference, inviting ~15 partners from Europe, the U.S. and Mexico to Moscow. Here we all are, on Revolution Square next to Red Square and the Kremlin:

Read on…

We’d just started getting used to – even comfortable with – working from home every day and to ‘social’ distancing (wouldn’t ‘physical’ distancing have been a better term?:). Our partner conferences and other events had only just got back up to pre-lockdown scale in terms of the number of folks taking part – albeit online. I’d just gotten used to 10/15/20 kilometers of running of a morning before breakfast. In short, everything was going in one direction. But then the other day, out of the blue, suddenly things seemed to slam into reverse when I was asked, via the good K folks in our PR department, to do an interview – ‘on camera, in the office – tomorrow please!’. Well, well. All righty!…

Indeed, it looks like were heading back, slowly, to ~normality, despite the masks and sanitizer, after months without normal daily social interaction in person. Part of me thinks: ‘Good’ – let’s get back to work‘ (a fave phrase of mine). Another part of me recalls: ‘But, we have been working – as normal – throughout the whole of lockdown!’. Still, I do miss the office – seeing people, being among people, talking to people in person, as I’m sure many do, despite some of the upsides to working from home which surprisingly became apparent.

Anyway, the other day, I gave my first physically face-to-face interview in over three months. It was about one of our (cloud-related) business partnerships. Hmm – actually, it wasn’t quite ‘face-to-face’; it was ‘mask-to-mask’ – for practically the whole film crew and interviewer, of course, were masked up. I suggested to them that I join in and put one on, but they didn’t fancy that idea much. Still, as you can see, the ‘social distancing’ (even ‘distant socializing’ might be a better phrase:) rules were strictly followed.

Read on…

Back with more K cyber-nostalgia – this post takes us back to a very special year for the company – the year of its founding! And as you can see from the date on our company registration certificate – that founding took place on June 26, 1997:

And that’s why we have our yearly mega-birthday-bash every June July (don’t ask; what’s a month among friends?!) – only not this year: the first time we’ve ever not had one. Shame. But what can you do?

I remember our first birthday party the following year in 1998, in a fairly rough bowling alley. Not too impressed with such a setting, we made amends the following year – already branching out into the countryside surrounding Moscow, where it’s been every year since, and where I really hope it will be again next year.

Here’s another curious K-tale from the summer of 1997…

Read on…