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!…

One of the main reasons for my recent trip to Turkey was our annual global partner conference, which brought together 100+ business partners from 35 countries – from Chile to Japan. The weather outside was chilly (in Turkey!), but the event itself went off without a hitch!…

Let’s get started!…

Read on…

Turkey’s main city is Istanbul – there’s no doubt about that. But the capital of the country is Ankara, and that’s where we needed to go last week for a variety of important business meetings. Ankara Airport is a modest one but it all the same impressed us with its interior design – featuring even a pool (but without the fish). Ankara Airport also gave us an adventure unlike anything I’ve ever encountered in my highly active and lengthy travel experience!…

So here’s how it went….

Read on…

Privyet folks!

My February and March passed unusually quietly – without any particularly long trips. Was it fate preparing me for upcoming heroic feats? Fate or no – here those feats come: the rest of April, and both May and June, are shaping up to be quite eventful.

In the meantime I’ve had the chance to visit a few cool places closer to home. One of them was the Museum of the Special-Purpose Garage.

And it turned out to be a most curious place! It houses both vintage and more modern cars that over the years have been used to chauffeur around the top officials of the country – since 1921 to present day. So for fans of the history of Russian state limousines, this place is simply must-see. Or even if you just like checking out luxury retro cars – it’s a great place to visit:

Read on: A VIP-car museum in Moscow – I just had to go!

Fasten your seatbelts – in every sense! We’re flying to an absolutely mind-blowing place – Salar de Uyuni, or the Uyuni Salt Flat in Bolivia!

The distance from La Paz to Uyuni by car is only 540km, but Google Maps claims the journey takes a whopping eight hours – for Bolivian roads are far from speedy highways. That’s why most tourists opt for a flight. Plus the view from the plane window is stunning; just be sure to sit on the right side.

Just after take-off you get a great view of El Alto (whose airport is at a dizzying altitude of 4061 meters!):

Then come colorful desert landscapes with volcanoes on the horizon:

And here it is – the salt flat! The opposite shore is a staggering 120km away – the visibility is incredible! The view of the lake is breathtaking…

Read on…

Next up on our LatAm-2025 trip, not far from Bolivia’s de facto capital, La Paz, there’s the unique tourist attraction known as Death Road. It’s around a 30-kilometer stretch of the “Old Death Road” (I’ll explain why it’s called that later) that runs through extremely dangerous yet breathtakingly beautiful mountains. And we were going to experience it on bicycles. And I reckon it’s worth flying to La Paz just for this bike ride alone…

Briefly – an overview…

First, I repeat, it’s breathtakingly beautiful:

Read on…

Farewell Titicaca, and I hope we’ll meet again. Meanwhile, our January journey through Latin America was heading deeper into Bolivia. Destination – La Paz…

La Paz is Bolivia’s second-largest city (if we exclude suburbs) and also the de facto capital of the country – though de jure the capital is Sucre. Yes – there’s a bit of confusion here re the cities, but this post won’t be about Bolivia’s administrative divisions; it’s about something much more interesting (and unusual). For here in Bolivia there are some truly fascinating sights. But let’s take things step by step…

One of La Paz’s suburbs is the urban area of El Alto. If you look at a map, the size of this “suburb” actually surpasses that of La Paz itself, with its population having (probably) already exceeded a million. Given that El Alto is situated at an altitude of over 4000 meters, it’s the highest-altitude city with over a million inhabitants. From a plane, it doesn’t look particularly impressive. And if you take a closer look – yes, it’s quite obvious that the income level per capita here isn’t very high ->

Of course, one could focus more on the surrounding views of the city:

But if you pay attention to the buildings along the streets, you might notice something unusual:

Read on…

Our LatAm-2025 journey continues: farewell Peru; hello Bolivia!…

We begin in this country at Lake Titicaca – its Bolivian side, since we’d just explored the Peruvian side.

Mediterranean-like (in appearance), oxygen-deprived (altitude: nearly 4000m), and really quite fascinating!…

There isn’t all that much to fully contemplate-meditate upon here on the Islands of the Sun and Moon. All the same, these are still iconic places rich in history: legend has it that, on the former island, the first Inca (the founder of the Inca Empire) Manco Cápac (and his wife Mama Ocllo), first appeared to the people. That’ll do for me; so, at least once in my lifetime, I figured I just had to get here and immerse myself in the place and its history – and landscapes. And the place turned out to be really very pleasant – it seems to invite you to settle down, calm down, sit on a bench, and meditate on the view ->

Read on…

Next up on our Latin American trip was the legendary Lake Titicaca – the vast high-altitude (elevation: 3812 meters) freshwater lake…

That photo’s a bit ahead of the story, as it was taken from the Bolivian side of the lake; we were still on Peruvian territory…

Our main goal was to visit the floating reed islands of the unique Uru (Uros) people. Let me first tell you a bit about them…

A long time ago – even before the rule of the Incas – these people lived on the shores of Lake Titicaca. But as the Inca Empire expanded, conquering more and more land, it eventually reached around here. The Uru didn’t have many options: either perish fighting against the much stronger invader – or surrender (into slavery).

But the Uru found another solution: they got into their boats and sailed out across the lake to hide in the reed marshes several kilometers from the shore. And since the Incas had come to stay, the Uros remained in the reeds. They built islands and houses and lived there so as to escape the conquerors. When they were eventually discovered, the Incas didn’t wipe them out (perhaps they were satisfied with their conquests by then) but instead imposed a small tax on them.

Centuries passed – the Incas were wiped out by the Spaniards, Peru eventually gained independence from Spain, and much water has since flowed from Lake Titicaca – yet the Uros people continued to live on their floating islands, and still do to this day! Something like this:

Read on…

Can you trust the internet? A 200% rhetorical question. Those who once did have either died, gone bankrupt, or never developed intellectually since kindergarten. Or could it be otherwise? Unfortunately, even seasoned, life-hardened travelers still fall for internet scams. Here’s a tale about how I recently got fooled by convincingly pretty picturesfound on said internet…

If you search the net for the most fascinating and beautiful scenic spots of Peru, the name Vinicunca is bound to pop up. These are the so-called Rainbow Mountains, which are shown like this (photo from the just-referenced Wikipedia) ->

Of course, seeing that – we all agreed that we just had to go! So off we popped…

Yes, bad weather and lack of sunlight could be blamed, but where were the colors? Here’s what we actually saw! ->

Something doesn’t quite add up between what the internet says and what we observed ourselves. Maybe we just visited at the wrong time? Let’s investigate: can you trust the internet?…

Read on…