Kaspersky Lab is 15! Believe me – that’s a long time. That many years in the IT industry is a whole epoch, no – several epochs.

In 1997 when the company was founded our main enemy was cyber-hooliganism. At the start of the 2000s this was overtaken by organized cybercrime, and our task became considerably more difficult: on the other side of the barricades there wasn’t a bunch of uncoordinated hackers any more; large cross-border cyber-criminal structures had firmly established themselves – illegally earning millions of dollars in profits. Today, cyber-crime been joined by a new and much more fearsome phenomenon – cyber-warfare. Recent cyber-war attacks such as Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame show how it’s not just “business” any more, but politics, with those behind cyber-warfare not in it for the money. They’ve got different objectives. Cyber-warfare activities are also much greater in scale, or rather – reach, so the destructive force of attacks has gone up too. We’ve seen how poorly protected IT infrastructure can be exploited to paralyze whole cities, industries, even countries. Thus we’ve entered an ominous new era – that of cyber-warfare. What we need to do in response is join forces in a worldwide fight for security.

For our company this new era sure is a challenge. The goalposts have moved, but we’re moving with them. We’ve had nothing but moving goalposts now for 15 years! We’ve always had to deal with new threats, so we’ve gotten well used to always being on guard and not letting it down for just a second. So figuratively, but also as a matter of fact, our guys work 24 hours, seven days a week, and 365 days a year in keeping the guard up and maintaining protection from threats. Over our 15 year history we’ve built up a gigantic database, containing more than 94 million samples of malware and around 300 million trusted – whitelisted – files.

Read on: KL: 15 Years Old – How Time’s Flown!

Greetings all!
If someone had said to me back in 1997 that in 2012 the company would be celebrating its 15th birthday party, I’d have belly laughed in his or her face!

Read on: We’re 15 Years Old!

I’ve just added another entry to the list of countries I’ve been to – bringing my total now up to 69, or, if we include Antarctica (as an independent territory) – 70. So it’s a bit of a jubilee!

Hi all from sunny Nassau, the capital of the Bahamian Islands. Specifically, from the Atlantis resort on Paradise Island! Though I’d heard a lot about the Bahamas, and remember it in the James Bond film Thunderball, I’d never actually got round to getting myself there. Until now. Yes, today it’s me who’s in the coconut-palm, white-beach paradise.

More: Atlantis twins and some business stuff…

Infosecurity Europe, to give it its full title, is the largest European exhibition for the IT security industry. The yearly event is referred to by just about everyone as “Infosec”.

This isn’t just any old IT security exhibition, of which there are now quite a few. It’s really quite a unique one since despite the worldwide tendency for such events to be as dull as dishwater (one example of which is CeBIT). Infosec is actually very interesting and a lot of fun.

More: Fun stuff serious people play…

The main occasion of our recent series of events in Cancun was the Security Analyst Summit (SAS) – the supreme congress of KL’s most distinguished virus analysts (woodpeckers; why woodpeckers? – see the full story here) and invited external security experts, who come together to boast about their achievements; exchange ideas, opinions and experiences; and, of course, do some informal networking.

The idea of the woodpecker summit goes back years. Its inception came in 1997 in Prague. We decided to reject the status quo – the usual boring model of what a summit should be about – and rethink the whole idea from scratch. What we came up with was a mostly informal get-together in comfortable surroundings in a distant, original location to discuss our technological breakthroughs. And one such breakthrough happens to have been the basic blueprint of our antivirus engine – named after the Czech capital where it was ‘born’. Clearly something was working with the summit format.

There followed rather a long break, but then in the early 2000s the tradition was kick-started again and these micro-conferences (in which only our employees took part at first) started being held sometimes several times a year. Since then there’ve been 15 of them.

Then in 2009 this tradition was updated and expanded – to version 2.0: transformed into much bigger, non-KL-exclusive, annual “woodpecker summits” in warm climes and with a serious intention to make the summits the main yearly event of the industry. Our latest – the fourth – was in the sunny Mexican resort of Cancun – coming across, I think, as a serious pronouncement of our present status. We had some 100+ attendees from 14 countries, great presentations and plenty of awesome team building. More details are in the guest post below from our Senior Virus Analyst, Yury Namestnikov:

Read more: SAS 2012 unleashed …

A big hello from Munich!

More news, and this time I’d call it ‘The big Euro freeze’.

Europe is slowly icing over as a result of Siberian freezing weather blasting across the continent. Eastern Europe (Romania and Bulgaria) has been buried under meters of snow, the cold in Germany is bitter; in France it’s biting; England has also had its fair share and has cancelled a number of flights. I can only guess what is happening in Scandinavia and Poland. In Munich today it’s -9C, and it’s supposed to get down to -19C tonight, but the Bavarians are undaunted!

The photos are not mine, seeing as how I was at the Munich Security Conference all day. I’m a newbie here – I’ve never been involved at this level before (well, if you discount the London Conference on Cyberspace and Davos), but everything seemed to go well! I was on the roundtable, a few meetings and interviews. Here is my observations of the proceedings.

Read more: Big geopolitical players talk cyber security

Howdy all!

A couple of Fridays back our friendly international team plus special guests had our annual Christmas & New Year work do! It wasn’t a Much Ado about Nothing. It was a Much Ado about ROCK! This year our luau took place in a brand spanking new Moscow venue called Kazakova Hall, which opened only in September just off the busy Kutuzovsky Prospekt (getting there turned out to be a bit of a ‘mare – one minus). The place was basically an abandoned factory – a second minus; still, to some I think it was a plus – especially for our foreign employees :)

Anyway, all the rest was one big fat funking plus! The shindig was called “Rock the New Year!” with real bikers, bikes, and Bigfoots supporting the entourage of the rocker party. Around 1500 guests partied the night away, including 200 guests from our regional offices.

See more: The program details and some nice shots!

Hi everyone,

You won’t believe it, but I’m in Dubai… again!

This time we held our annual European Partner Conference at the Jumeirah Zabeel Saray hotel, on the beach of the iconic Palm Jumeirah. More than 100 partners from all over Europe worked hard for two days – and played hard at Ferrari World in neighboring Abu-Dhabi.

“I was supposed to travel to a small Muslim country, but here I see no less than Manhattan!” said one guy in the party, blinking in amazement. “Dubaihattan,” I corrected him.

More > Dubaihattan views. And sunrise too.

Hi everybody!

Time to tell you about a bunch of really exciting events I’ve been to over the past few weeks. It’s been a fairly crazy mini-tour covering Geneva, Dublin and London non-stop. Two or three days in each city and each time talking to some very interesting people on all sorts of hot topics.

It all started with the United Nation’s International Telecommunication Unit (ITU) meetings in Switzerland. The organization is showing great progress towards developing a common approach to fighting cybercrime on an international level. However, I’m afraid I can’t tell you any further details. It was a very hush-hush private meeting behind closed doors where we discussed some issues I can’t share with you at the moment. Nevertheless – stay tuned and soon I’ll be able to uncover some details…

Next up was Dublin and the F.ounders 2011 conference, which we’ve already mentioned here.

Last stop – the London Conference on Cyberspace. This was quite something – in fact, it unexpectedly turned out to be this year’s best event I was involved in!

The conference, organized by the British Foreign Office, took place on November 1-2 in the Borough of Westminster. I would like to thank the British Foreign Secretary and First Secretary of State William Hague for his personal invitation to me to take part in the event. I must say it was a surprise to find myself as the only “boss” from the IT security industry to address the audience. But then on the other hand I think the Foreign Office made the right choice – big-wigs from competitors would only have given the audience the same old BBB (Boring Business Blah blah blah) and spoiled the event!

More > Saving the Internet in London …

Hi everybody,

Last week I was lucky enough to have been enjoying true Irish hospitality at the oh-so-special-yet-informal F.ounders 2011 conference.

It was a great experience, even for me – a person whom it’s quite difficult to surprise with an event. Some people call F.ounders the “Davos for Geeks”, and frankly speaking I would in some ways agree with this description! But “geek” I think has some negative connotation, if only jokingly. Here though – there was only positivity – tons thereof. Unique!

The recipe for the event was quite simple.

You mix together renowned IT-entrepreneurs, high-profile press, investors and promising start-uppers; then pour the mixture into a beautiful city, add lashings of real draft Guinness (the sort that takes aeons to settle before a top-up – only found in Ireland, (sadly)), then heat up with personal attendances of national leaders and local celebrities, and you’re done! What you get is the delicious F.ounders cocktail!

More > Bono leads the way on a Dublin pub crawl!