Kevin McAleavey, cofounder and chief architect of the KNOS Project, who said he is a long-time acquaintance of Kaspersky, believes that while Kaspersky is a loyal citizen of his country, "he's always demonstrated to me that as a person, he's a 'white knight' and genuinely believes that malware that can cause harm to innocent citizens through attacks on civilian infrastructure is an issue that has no national boundaries."īut McAleavey agrees that given Kaspersky's exposure of U.S. So, should anyone trust an OS designed by a Russian with that kind of background and track record? As Gary McGraw puts it, "Millions of people use his antivirus products, but that's just for consumers - it's not control-system software." Kaspersky had outed - and in effect killed - it," Schactman wrote. "On June 19, The Washington Post was able to confirm that Flame was yet another part of shadow war against Iran. And then Kaspersky went public with it, pointing at the U.S.
They named one of the modules, which was used to infect other computers, Flame. Earlier this year, a team from Kaspersky Lab exposed what they called an entire toolkit for online espionage in more than 417 computers, most in the Middle East and nearly half in Iran.
Kaspersky has assisted the FSB in investigations, and the FSB played a major role in recovering his son, Ivan, who was kidnapped in April 2011.īeyond that, when it comes to taking sides in cyber conflict, Kaspersky has not been a U.S. Part of his education and training was sponsored by the KGB, he is a past Soviet intelligence officer (some suspect he has not completely retired from that role) and as Schactman notes, he has a "deep and ongoing relationship with Russia's Federal Security Service, or FSB," the successor to the KGB and the agency that operates the Russian government's electronic surveillance network. But while he considers himself at some level a citizen of the world, he has close ties to Russian intelligence and Vladimir Putin.
companies like Microsoft, Cisco and Juniper Networks. Kaspersky's products are among the top ranked worldwide, are used by an estimated 300 million people and are embraced by U.S. The "bad guys" include anyone who wants to protest against the government. "But the bad guys - they can abuse this freedom to manipulate public opinion." "Freedom is good," Kasperksy told Schactman. He advocates government monitoring and regulation of social networking sites. He wants it partitioned, with a digital "passports" required for access to certain areas and activities. Noah Schactman, in a lengthy profile for, noted that Kaspersky doesn't like the current level of Internet freedom. "The real question is, do you trust the people who built your system? The answer had better be yes," he added.Īnd that is the bigger problem here: Kaspersky, by his own account, wants to change the world as well as save it, and not in ways that appeal to Western thinking and U.S. Gary McGraw, CTO of Cigital, a long-time advocate of "building security in" rather than "managing risk," said he believes, "the philosophy behind what Kaspersky is doing is right." But he said even though the OS would be very narrowly focused on the operation of control systems that need to be "on all the time," he doubts that Kaspersky Lab will have anything on the market soon. But on this side of that world in need of saving, the enthusiasm is somewhat tempered, even though security experts agree that a bullet-proof OS for industrial systems would be a very good thing, and Kaspersky is among those who could make one.
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