Eugene Kaspersky seems to be a different CEO – at least less formal than top executives normally are. He graduated from the Institute of Cryptography, Telecommunications and Computer Science in 1987, and in 1997 co-founded the developer secure content and threat management solutions company that carries his last name: Kaspersky Lab.
Last year during a visit to Brazil’s Formula One Grand Prix to announce a two-years contract with Scuderia Ferrari, the CEO hosted a press breakfast where he spent some time discussing the anatomy of cyber-crimes and security threats and claimed that the Internet must be a military-free zone.
“In the future we will see much more cyber military, sabotage and terrorism attacks. The big problem is that IT systems around the globe are very similar; they are all standard,” Kaspersky said.
Indeed, as he noted in his blog, “A malware can seize control of a missile, but a missile can’t be used to destroy malware. With the right tools a missile can be diverted by malware, but no amount of firepower can divert rogue software once it is active.”
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Kaspersky listed five different sources of threats in order to better explain the seriousness of the situation.
The first source – and least offensive – is young people who create viruses for fun. The second source are anonymous groups of hackers that do not target financial return. “They are revolutionaries or just wrong people,” Kaspersky explained.
The third, and most traditional source is cyber criminals, which attack banks and credit card companies to steal money. “Many of them are from China, Latin American countries, Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” Kaspersky noted.
The fourth source Kaspersky labeled “the barbarians of the Internet”: people and groups that target companies to collect their data. “They are very professional. They know the victim and what they are looking for. It is much more complicated than the traditional attack,” the CEO noted.
Kaspersky has also explained these groups seek information to steal and it is not always related to bank’s data. They target military, government or industrial secret information. “It is hard to identify who’s behind these groups.”
The fifth source is espionage, cyber weapon or cyber terrorism groups. That’s why he claims governments need more money to combat cyber criminal and that they must work together. “Governments understand the situation is critical, but they are addressing efforts only toward traditional cybercriminals, not to cyber weapons and military,” he noted.
