MOSCOW: "All we're trying to do is save the world," says Eugene Kaspersky, founder of the Kaspersky Lab, one of Russia's top software companies and maker of a leading antivirus product.
Together we gazed out at the frozen vistas of Russia's capital as we discussed the threats that will face business users and consumers this year and into the future. The biggest threat, claims Kaspersky, is Internet crime.
Kaspersky had invited me to visit his company's virus lab and headquarters in a once super-secret research facility located on the northern edge of Moscow.
He showed me the efforts his company is making to fight the growing malware threat through early detection and rapid analysis. But the real danger, he says, is through targeted attacks by criminals against specific companies. Those attacks, he notes, are difficult of impossible for an antivirus or other antimalware product to protect against.
As Kaspersky explains it, the nature of today's security threat has changed dramatically. Virus creation is down significantly, while attacks aimed at separating users from their money are rising steeply. The difference is that the virus writers of old were young people trying to prove themselves. Those people, he explains, are now proving themselves with online games. Now the attacks are motivated by money.
