Hi all!

Now, if you’re not too hot on geography, I’m writing this from Washington, D.C., with the D.C. standing for District of Columbia, don’t you know. There’s another Washington – Washington state – on the other side of the American continent, but without the D.C. There’s a Colombia – the South American country; then there’s Columbia University in New York; there’s Columbo – the TV detective fond of beige sack-like raincoats; and to add to the confusion, round the other side of the globe there’s Colombo – the largest city of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), which is where we’re headed today.

Our three days in Washington whizzed past like a film on fast-forward: As per, we were whizzing about all over the place getting to event after event. And I really mean whizzing – just like a (non-D.C.) squirrel in a wheel – unlike the local squirrels here, which royally, haughtily and languidly stroll about parks as if they own them – not the easily-startled beasts I’m used to.

I won’t tell you all about all the events we took part in here – there’s not much point and it’d probably be pretty dull reading! (Note to event organizers/participants – your events were not dull to me :) I’ll just share with you one comment about the Billington Cybersecurity Summit where I got to speak about cyber threats, more info on which you can read here.

I really enjoyed personally meeting a whole lotta highly placed officials at the event and discussing with them in some detail the topic of cybersecurity and fighting computer maliciousness around the world. I was pleasantly surprised by how much these ladies and gentlemen – on whom a lot of US policy and thus security depends – know about the subject, and especially pleased to discover that their positions are very much like mine. Phew.

Work done, come Saturday we were able to get a bit of sightseeing in. We even managed to visit a couple of museums. The National Museum of Natural History we didn’t think too much of – all those dug-up mastodons and dinosaur bones look kind of unconvincing. While the Air and Space Museum… oh yes – that was more like it. All sorts of interesting stuff to see there, from the Wright brothers’ first airplane to the very latest drone. There are Messerschmitts, an SS-20, a Pershing, copies of Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz, and so on and so on. I decided against taking photos – there are plenty on the Internet. But it’s best to see it all in the flesh, of course.

More: Columbia-Doha-Colombo …

Hi all!

Ready. Steady. Go!

The season’s traversing the globe – rather, the northern hemisphere – has begun with gusto.

First up – Tianjin (天津, “Heavenly Passage, Ford”), China, which is approximately 100 kilometers southeast of Beijing en route to the sea. The city (actually, its central district – along the banks of the river) is really impressive to look at – but not in the more traditional Chinese sense of hustle and bustle and lots of folks and bicycles; instead – one of calm, quiet neat-and-tidiness, plus very few folks – and fewer bikes. Some of the parks are almost like those in… er, a much smaller nearby country, which I’d better not mention just now.

Along the riverbanks there’s a kind of fusion of styles going on here. Looking at the new buildings and bridges you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re in Paris, a bit later on – London; over there there’s a totally-Tokyo (oops) skyscraper, round the corner there was an Italian quarter… (we didn’t manage to see that, or plenty of other places worth checking as we only had an hour for our walkabout). The river is the Hai (海河) btw, which means “sea-river”.

More: The place where famous pics of FDR, Churchill and Stalin sat together were taken …

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.