Something important has happened – though you might have missed it…

The third version of our Research Sandbox has been released!

Hmm. Hardly jaw-dropping, right? But it still matters – big time. Let me tell you why…

What is it?

What’s a sandbox? Let me start with the very basics…

How can you tell if an object (file, web resource…) is malicious? The simplest way is to run it and see what happens. If it steals passwords and card data or encrypts files and demands a ransom – there you go: it’s malicious. But “sucking it and seeing” is hardly a great idea given the damage such infections/encryption can wreak.

To safely test a suspicious object in a controlled environment, we created a sandbox – a sort of virtual petri dish where malware can reveal its true malicious colors while we observe it under a microscope.

Read on…

Hi folks!

…And for us it was hi St. Pete!

But, why does everyone always complain about how gloomy and rainy this city is? Every time I’m there – it’s all bright sunshine and blue skies! ->

We’re still in the thick of our hot season – packed with conferences, expos, meetings, and all kinds of other work-related stuff – plus a ton of travel around the globe. Early last week we wrapped up our global partner conference in Istanbul, while on Wednesday to Friday we had our Kaspersky Future Conference up in St. Petersburg for our major enterprise customers. It was a totally new format for us – we’d never done anything on such a scale before – but it worked out great: zero teething problems, or, as we say in Russia, the first pancake wasn’t a flop!

It all took place in downtown St. Pete, at the Astoria Hotel:

We brought together almost 250 folks from 130+ companies, and there were nearly 30 talks (less than half of which were ours – most came from the guests). I took to the stage too and shared my predictions about the future of cyber-nastiness. Sadly, the outlook’s grim…

But if you’re thorough in setting up the right processes and protocols, you can bring the risk of cyberattacks down to practically zero – and finally get a good night’s sleep :)

On top of that, we ran several workshops on incident investigation and other topics in our field:

During breaks, people mingled in the main area – something like this:

We also picked up some pretty colorful terms from the talks:

• Not just “threats” – but “black swans”
• “Ripe tomatoes”: we all want to be ripe tomatoes, not green ones
• Internal DDoS attack during an antivirus update :)
• Talking to IT is like making a deal with the devil // from the cybersecurity POV
• “Underbelly scanner” :)

It’s clear that information-security folks aren’t exactly popular, for we tend to get in the way of business-as-usual. Hence the rebranding of infosec departments: “Information Security Department”: ISD -> “Idiotic Sabotage Department”! Oh yes – very drole. But!… If you don’t do security (well), it’s only gonna be worse – way worse.

One nice little perk for me: since we’d brought a whole bunch of guests to both attend the conference at the Astoria and stay there too, the hotel management treated me to a luxury suite – (huge thanks to them!) ->

Honestly, I really don’t need such fancy digs, but if they’re offering – why not? And folks often ask me to show off some unique hotels and other lodgings. So here it is – this is what the Rachmaninoff Suite looks like:

Not bad, eh?

Luxurious!

The third room? Half-bar-half-library! ->

Views from the room:

To wrap things up – a shot from one of the restaurants hosting our evening bashes:

That’s it for St. Pete – time to head home! But it won’t be long till I’m back on the road once again!…

What exactly is artificial intelligence?

These days the term is slapped on practically anything software-driven that runs automatically. If it can do something by itself, people break into a cold sweat and are ready to swear eternal allegiance to it. In reality, the term “artificial intelligence” has different interpretations depending on the level of self-awareness across various layers of the population of our planet. For example, there are the rather primitive definitions in online encyclopedias, where AI, I quote, “refers to the capability of computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making”. This means, for example, that being able to play checkers or chess falls under the AI definition – even if the program can’t do anything else: no bike riding, no potato peeling, no pizza delivery routing…

However, the collective [un]consciousness believes that these IT novelties with “smart” features are indeed the very “digital brain” seen in Hollywood movies – capable of anything and everything, now and forever. It also believes that, soon, we mammals will have to go and hide in caves again – just like in the dinosaur era. Likely? I, for one, don’t think so…

The modern popular belief in an all-powerful AI – it’s all pure nonsense: about as ridiculous as ancient tribes’ terror during thunderstorms – thinking the gods were battling over their divine goals and motivations.

Neural networks, machine learning, ontology, generative AI, and other programming stuff – that’s the current level of “digital intelligence”; nothing more. These are programs or software-hardware systems designed to solve specific tasks – trained, steered, and fine-tuned by human experts. They’re not even trying to be universal – current tech just can’t handle that!

Read on…

Hi folks – from Algeria!

It’s the first time I’ve been to this country – giving me a +1 to my list of visited countries: the 106^th! And it’s the second newbie to that list this year (after the Philippines)…

Here’s a view of the country’s capital – Algiers:

A few facts about the country:

Read on…

Despite the extraordinarily uncharacteristic weather in Dubai, we still managed to hold our first ever international Cyber Immunity Conference there; hurray!

So, what is Cyber Immunity? (In case you don’t know; sorry if you do.) It’s our approach to building cybersystems that are secure-by-design and, as such, resilient against hacker attacks.

Actually, there’s a lot of talk about what it is. There’s talk about programming needing to be accurate and secure, and that we need secure processes of program code development, multilevel testing and cross-checks, and other such nonsense. But we believe that the main thing in security-by-design is the basic architecture of the operating system; specifically, its ability to protect even untrusted and vulnerable components/modules/applications, or, rather – block their abnormal behavior. We’ve lots more detailed information here, and those who want to dive even deeper into it are welcome to contact our experts, who can be reached at the same link.

As we hurtle ever deeper into the cyber-era, it’s clear that Cyber Immunity will be our savior. Alas, it’s still only one side of the coin in that cyber-era, for there are still the ever-increasing professionalism and numbers of hacker attacks from the other side of the barricades. However, I firmly believe that, out of the two, one side has no long-term future. Guess which one ). But for that scenario to materialize we need to learn how to build cybersystems that are secure-by-design to be able to fend off hacker attacks. That is the future of the cyberworld. And the other week, when we were down in the UAE, it was of course highly fitting to be able to talk about the cyberfuture in Dubai’s Museum of the Future ->

All righty. Off we pop to our conference…

Read on…

Hi folks – from Austria!…

But I wasn’t here to just look out of windows at the dreary Euro-weather. I was here on business – lots of it; first and foremost – to personally receive this! ->

…For, when your company is awarded none other than “Product of the Year”, by none other than AV-Comparatives, not getting yourself down to Tirol to receive it in person is simply out of the question!…

Read on…

Ladies and gents, girls and boys!

Here’s something that needs celebrating (to brighten up these dull and dreary wintry days). The independent testing lab AV-Comparatives has released its Summary Report 2023 in which it “highlights the high-scoring [consumer anti-virus] products” it tested throughout last year. A total of 16 security solutions were rigorously put through their paces in several different tests – including of their ability to protect against malware and advanced threats, of performance (low-system impact), absence of false alarms, and so on and so forth. And out of all 16 there was only one winner – the only product that secured top marks in all 16 of the tests. Can you guess who?! Ok, it’s hardly a toughie since it’s me who’s telling you, but… yes: it was our Kaspersky Standard – named Product of the Year 2023! Hurray!

Ooh – that’ll go nicely in our shiny awards cabinet here at HQ. Oh – wait: is there any room left?!

What’s especially satisfying is that the testers heaped praise not only on the product’s technical capabilities, but also its interface. So it wasn’t for nothing we added plenty more top-notch functionality while seriously overhauling how it all looks. Nice.

Btw – for more than two decades already we’ve been constantly under AV-Comparatives’ microscope – unlike some of our competitors who only select the tests they’d do well in. Which brings me on to another win for us: we’ve garnered the most awards from AV-Comparatives out of all tested vendors across various categories – totaling a full 57 awards (two of which were for low impact on system performance)!

But wait. There’s yet more good news!…

Read on…

Hi all,

I’ve some big news about a cyber-incident we’ve uncovered…

Our experts have discovered an extremely complex, professional targeted cyberattack that uses Apple’s mobile devices. The purpose of the attack is the inconspicuous placing of spyware into the iPhones of employees of at least our company – both middle and top management.

The attack is carried out using an invisible iMessage with a malicious attachment, which, using a number of vulnerabilities in the iOS operating system, is executed on a device and installs spyware. The deployment of the spyware is completely hidden and requires no action from the user. The spyware they quietly transmits private information to remote servers: microphone recordings, photos from instant messengers, geolocation, and data about a number of other activities of the owner of the infected device.

Despite the attack being carried out as discreetly as possible, the infection was detected by the Kaspersky Unified Monitoring and Analysis Platform (KUMA) – a native SIEM solution for security information and event management; the system detected an anomaly in our network coming from Apple devices. Further investigation by our team showed that several dozen iPhones of senior employees were infected with new, extremely technologically sophisticated spyware we’ve dubbed “Triangulation”.

Read on…

I’m a bit tired by now of all the AI news, but I guess I’ll have to put up with it a bit longer, for it’s sure to continue to be talked about non-stop for at least another year or two. Not that AI will then stop developing, of course; it’s just that journalists, bloggers, TikTokers, Tweeters and other talking heads out there will eventually tire of the topic. But for now their zeal is fueled not only by the tech giants, but governments as well: the UK’s planning on introducing three-way AI regulation; China’s put draft AI legislation up for a public debate; the U.S. is calling for “algorithmic accountability“; the EU is discussing but not yet passing draft laws on AI, and so on and so forth. Lots of plans for the future, but, to date, the creation and use of AI systems haven’t been limited in any way whatsoever; however, it looks like that’s going to change soon.

Plainly a debatable matter is, of course, the following: do we need government regulation of AI at all? If we do — why, and what should it look like?

Read on…

There’s no stopping – not even a slowing down of – the passing of time, no matter how much we might want it. So we don’t waste… time, energy and nerves on fighting the inevitable. But what do we do instead? Well, I reckon that if you pump the time you have on the planet with meaningful and useful goals, events, achievements, excitement, and assorted other positive, busy “content” (though I do so dislike that term:), then said time we have will leave two-dimensional linearity and inevitability and blossom into a multi-dimensional world of energy and vigor to give life meaning. Yep – you know me: always positive – no matter what )…

Routine screws up memories, while the passing of time steadily nullifies the memory cells that store those memories. Life imperceptibly turns into an expressionless mass of vague sensations, and after renewing your passport two or three times – there can be emptiness. Note – “can” be. But life is what you make it: you can instead live as “correctly” as possible. And for me, included in my list of living maximally “correct” come my annual reviews! To stop, duck out of the routine, think, remember, write, think again, and be amazed. And out of the fog of the passing year an outline of experiences, events and achievements becomes distinguishable. Then, emboldened by pride, I find myself fully ready for new endeavors in the New Year.

In the oh-so tricky year of 2022, the chances of losing oneself all the more in the fog were through the roof: geopolitics gets in the way of all that’s good. But at the same time this makes summarizing the results of last year all the more a correct and necessary endeavor. So this time I’ve split up my reviews to make sure we don’t miss vital detail: I’ve already shared my mostly-personal annual review, and also my patent review.

What remains is the concluding third part – which is what I’ll be giving you today in this here post: about our product-and-tech achievements – our “bread and butter” that makes up our whole raison d’être: protecting the world from cyber-evil. And there were plenty such achievements – a lot more than might be expected given the difficult circumstances throughout the year… All righty – enough “intro”; let’s get to it (after all, it’s February already, like – tomorrow!!)…

// Btw – that’s the cover of our Midori Kuma 2023 calendar – simply to brighten up this here text ). As per, it can be downloaded – here.

Ok – sit  down. Better – fasten your seatbelt too! For this number is a shocker – in the good sense: last year we launched more than 750 releases! No, no typo there folks. Really: seven hundred fifty releases! By that I mean new products, updates, patches, and assorted other localizations/customizations. // And some folks still think we just do antivirus?!!

Out of that huge bulk, here are a few I want to highlight…

Read on…