I’m glad the first part of our In-the-Spotlight series featuring Costin G. Raiu received so much attention and positive feedback on both Twitter and Facebook.

My special guest today is Aleks Gostev, Chief Security Expert at KL and highly valued member of the company’s Global Research & Analysis Team (GReAT).

Aleks is a unique multi-disciplinary infosec guy – one of the world’s most prominent security experts, who regularly appears in the mass media in interviews or writing op-eds. He became involved in anti-malware research in 1996 when he founded an anti-virus expertise center in the Komi Republic – a large territory in the North-West of Russia. Since 1998 he’s been Project Coordinator of Wildlist Russia – an initiative aimed at collecting and analyzing data about malware outbreaks in the country.

We first met in 2002, and I recall I felt he was the right guy for the company from the word go. Our first chat went something like:

– Married?
– Yes.
– Birth date?
– Mine or the wife’s?

Nice! That convinced me to give him a job tout de suite, and frankly speaking I’ve never regretted it. Aleks’ first big assignment was dealing with the notorious Slammer (Helkern) worm, which caused a major Internet outage in South Korea and infected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide. He managed the case perfectly: we were one of the first AV companies to report the outbreak and provide protection.

Short Bio

Aleks founded and led the Global Research & Analysis Team (GReAT) from 2008 before moving to his current position as Chief Security Expert with the team in 2010. Aleks analyzes all aspects of information security, with a focus on new threats and global outbreaks. His responsibilities include deep investigation of new malware and expert positioning of Kaspersky Lab. He is also editor-in-chief of Securelist. Before joining the company in 2002 he held various IT and security related positions in both public and private organizations.

You can follow Aleks on Twitter (@codelancer) and read his personal blog at Securelist.

He also does lots of rock climbing, traveling and extreme sports:

However, in this spotlight piece we will concentrate on Aleks’ expertise in cloud security.

Read more > The message to iCloud users

There’s been a lot talk for quite a while now surrounding how cloud technologies can help increase protection against malware. One tendency is to fall into the trap of considering the cloud as a silver bullet that can effectively solve all security related issues at once.

I agree that cloud-based protection certainly brings many advantages – both to end users and security vendors. Yes, it permits us to detect new threats much faster and deliver necessary updates to users. However, I don’t share the euphoria that is promoting this approach as a self-sufficient technique capable of tackling security threats by itself.

Protection needs to be multi-layered, with each layer complimenting the others, contributing to the overall security level and shielding computers in any environment – and in a well-balanced manner so as to maintain top computer performance.

There are three main issues that significantly limit the scope of cloud protection being used on its own.

Read more > The three key issues

More: Shady RAT: Shoddy RAT.. . .

The recent announcement by the Anonymous hacker group to take down Facebook on November 5 – Bonfire Night – has resulted in a series of online publications and sparked much hot debate.

The story surrounding this announcement seems to create more questions than provide answers.

First of all, the announcement is not all that recent. It went online a month ago, but surprisingly surfaced prominently in the media just earlier this week. However, the reason for this delay is not that important.

More interesting is whether this is a genuine announcement coming from Anonymous. Is it from some hackers pretending to be part of Anonymous? Or from some Anonymous members who are planning an operation of their own? Or is it just a hoax coming from an unknown party using the highly-publicized image of the hacker group for their own goals?

Too many questions – yeah, I know.

And here are the answers >

A little on the business.

It just so happened (how else?!) that our product line and business generally developed in a series of “waves”.

First, from 1997 to the early 2000s, came the “anti-virus engine licensing” wave. Since breaking out into the international market with our products was at first very difficult (affected by our being largely unknown and by prejudices related to our country of origin), we licensed our AV engine to IT security companies  (and did rather well at this!).

The income from our technology sales was spent in the main on development and promotion of our personal products (less attention was paid to the development of corporate products back then) – and this was the second wave (by the end of the 2000s-).

Then, the retail business and and online sales simply “blown up”. Since then,and bringing us up to the current era, the corporate business has finally begun to take off. And this is our third wave.

And now, ladies and gentlemen! Especially those who’ve long been waiting for our new breakthrough in the corporate segment.

Read more > beta-testing in progress

More: 7 Things Facebook Should Do To Increase Security.. . .

More: Megafail: Russian Mobile Operator Leaks Users’ SMS Histories.. . .

All-righty! Here we are with the latest news.

What we have been for ages talking about, explaining, and encouraging, at last is finally showing some signs of actually being put into practice.

A new body – the International Cyber Security Protection Alliance (ICSPA) (news, site)  – has been founded in London: an international non-commercial organization that brings together “governments, international business and law enforcement bodies, including Europol”. The aim of the new organization is simple: to tackle nationalistic narrow-mindedness, unite parochial strengths, and fight cyber-crime on a global level – together.

This is what we’ve been been advocating constantly for more than ten years. It’s impossible to tackle international criminals with traditional methods alone, when every country just thinks of itself, covers its own backside, and the rest of the world can go whistle.

Read more > United we stand

We just launched the newest version of our flagship products for personal use! I really like this release, which we were perfecting for nearly a year and which addresses many of the actual issues for protection against cyber-threats. Specifically, Kaspersky Anti-Virus and Kaspersky Internet Security now feature a totally new user interface, hybrid protection bringing the best of cloud and PC-based protection together, improved performance for business applications, VoIP and online gaming and much more …

More: 2012 Starts Now! Kaspersky Anti-Virus and Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 Are Now Available!. . .

No geeky computer security stuff in this post. No technical details about social networking scams or Twitter worms or malicious Facebook apps or whatever. You can always get this sort of information at first hand from a variety of trustworthy sources like Securelist or Threatpost to name a few.

There is something of a much greater concern I would like to talk about. Our children’s safety on social networks.

Read more > Stats & tips