![]() Put simply, his future was chosen for him. Switching from one program to the other was impossible. Eugene told me the faculty at the school was divided into two distinct-and very separate-groups: the KGB educators, and the MoD educators. From the day he enrolled, it was predetermined that he would be sent to work for the MoD upon graduation. Kaspersky landed at the Higher School of the KGB compliments of the Ministry of Defense (MoD). He recalled, “Back then the Higher School was an inter-ministerial / institutional educational facility sponsored by the KGB, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Atomic Energy, and the Soviet Space Program.” ![]() Obviously, he chose mathematician.Įugene attended the Higher School of the KGB. The Soviet Union gave him the choice between becoming a professional yachtsman, or a mathematician. For Eugene, the vast options available were narrowed down to just two. As you can imagine, life for the young Eugene Kaspersky was very different in the former Soviet Union.įor starters, the very concept of “what did you want to be when you grew up?” is different-almost completely foreign. Eugene was born in 1965 in Novorossiysk, Russia-a port town on the Black Sea. So we came up with the idea of developing our own product that would protect everyone from the greatest number of known threats.” Getting To Know Eugene KasperskyĮugene Kaspersky grew up in a very different world than your average Silicon Valley CEO. And it struck me that there were so many threats and so little protection. Later my friends seeing my interest would bring me other virus samples. I got interested, started exploring it and got carried away. Eugene told me, “It all began in 1989 when I found the Cascade virus on my computer. The founding of Kaspersky Lab was more serendipity than anything. There was no formal process or master plan in place. That’s why we’ve done it,” explained Eugene with a sly smile. ![]() Back in the nineties we were a small team of devoted young geeks and didn’t realize that the mission we want to do is impossible. “When you are at the very start of a long road you do not realize how complicated that road may become. The question I had for Eugene was, why? What was the spark or epiphany that led him to think “Hey, I should launch a security company!”? ![]() It was the ILoveYou virus in 2000 that essentially put malware on the map, and put the world on notice that the rules of the game had changed. Prior to widespread Internet access, malware could only really spread via floppy disk, so it posed a much smaller threat. There were PC security products available already when Kaspersky Lab was founded in 1997, but to be fair that was still before the concept of antivirus became mainstream for either businesses or consumers. That means researching malware, spam, exploits, DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks, cyber espionage threats and more, and then developing the tools to protect against them.Įugene sums up the mission of Kaspersky Lab like this: “We are here to save the world.” Simple enough. Second, the company strives to develop the necessary technologies, products, and services to defend against these threats. First, Kaspersky Lab aims to identify and predict the cyber threats that are coming next. Let’s take a step back, though, and explore the core of Kaspersky Lab. ![]()
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