The World's Biggest Cyber Crime Fighter (2024)

Eugene Kaspersky is the poster child of cyber security. Let’s face it, the man is huge. In Russia, he has a fan club while some of his peers (like John McAfee) have entanglements with foreign governments. I have a T-shirt his groupies made for him and his company, Kaspersky Lab. On it, his headshot is pixilated by the words Anti-Virus in green lettering. Groupies, here, is no understatement. The same adoration for “Kasper” follows into his offices in Moscow. His staff, most in their early thirties and twenties, is amazed by him.

“When he comes home to the Moscow office, it’s like daddy’s home,” says Anton Shingarev, 27, Kaspersky’s chief of staff. He was wrapping up an event in Rome on Dec. 13 with internet security types of the same age. Kaspersky was outside smoking on a veranda, circumvented by men chatting in Russian. “Everybody wants his time. Everyone wants to be with him.” Shingarev shakes his head. It’s a gesture that says, “unbelievable.”

Take every American stereotype you have of a Russian man and stick it in a meat grinder. If Moscow is gray and 10 below, 48-year-old Kaspersky is sunny and 75. In Cancun in February 2012, Kasperksy’s in a Hawaiian shirt at the Ritz Carlton mingling with pretty Russian women half his age and dancing around, never alone. It’s like no one can let this playful kid out of sight. At Davos recently (he’s a regular), the man’s cracking jokes about malware gangs and warning about cyber warfare. In Tokyo, he’s climbing Mount Fuji and pigging out on Sushi.

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On his desk in the company’s new $300 million digs along a man-made lake a half hour out of Moscow sits a model of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. Are you boldly going where no one in cyber security has gone before, Eugene? Yes, he says on a cold July afternoon. “Branson gave me that. I’m kind of a Virgin Galactic investor. I don’t know when we’re launching, but I’m going from cyber space to outer space,” he says.

A couple of yachts are berthed at a marina within eyeshot. They’re not his. He points across the lake. It’s the damn coldest summer day I’ve ever experienced. His house is there. “I like this office,” he tells me. “When the lake is frozen, I walk across it to work.”

Walking on water. Russian cosmonaut. The “cult” of Kaspersky is an easy one to fall into. Still, Kaspersky has put his name on the line. While his personality is legend, his product has to stand on its own.

In 10 years, Kaspersky has become one of the top three brands in internet security. Symantec , owners of Norton Antivirus, fired its CEO Enrique Salem last year. John McAfee, the bad boy of IT security, is now elated to have his name off the product and said his old McAfee anti-virus program “has reached a point of almost universal consumer hatred.”

This is not a sentence Kaspersky would ever say.

“He is the face of that company and he definitely likes it,” says Peter Firstbrook, a vice president at Gartner Research. In January, Gartner named Kaspersky a “Leader” in endpoint security protection for the third consecutive year. This isn’t some giant firm either. In U.S. consumer security, Kaspersky has around 9% market share.

“There’s a difference between his company and market leader Symantec. I think it’s youth and energy,” says Firstbrook. “You walk into Symantec’s office and it’s all 50 year olds. The other thing is that Symantec and McAfee have grown by acquisitions. They haven’t invented anything in years. Kaspersky Lab techs take the time to rewrite programs and even make new ones from nothing.”

I’m not a techie, and don’t always understand the lingo. But Firstbrook does. He mentions how Kaspersky has added application controls like whitelisting. Within a year’s time, they’ve built partnerships with Microsoft and Adobe.

“Smart people know Kaspersky has good software,” he says. “I think they are the best at catching malware. They’re consistently in the top half.”

There’s this room in Kaspersky Lab they call the war room. One tech is seated behind a circular table of computers. There are screens in front of him, and screens overhead. It’s all black and green scrolling text and numbers like the opening credits to the Matrix.

You have to speak another language to understand what they’re looking at. And it ain’t Russian. For those who do, it’s an encrypted DEX file. The file is a multi-functional Trojan that sends text messages to premium-rate phone numbers, downloads malware and remotely performs commands on the infected device. There’s something written in code: Backdoor.AndroidOS.Obad.a.

“ Google pays more attention to security than Apple but Android is where Microsoft was back in 1995 and 1996,” Kaspersky says. “Apple pays almost no attention to security.” He name drops. “You know, most of the attacks on computers in the Dalai Lama’s office were on Macs. The only reason why there are not more attacks on Macs is because there are less users and less engineers who know the operating system.”

Dalai Lama’s emails were hacked in 2012 and again in 2013, believed to be by the Chinese government.

Eugene Kaspersky likes to talk, but is also intensely private. It’s night. His five-story office building, which he leases to BMW, Tele2 and TKS Credit Systems has the upscale Admiral Yacht Club on the ground floor. There’s summery white sand trucked in, but tonight it feels like autumn in New York.

Kaspersky is in his blue barracuda and walks off the patio to the “beach”, escorted by three muscular body guards in suits. On April 19, 2011, his then 20-year-old son Ivan was kidnapped while walking to work in Moscow. Kaspersky was asked to pay 3.3 million euros in ransom. He phoned the Russian Federal Security Service for help. Three days later, Ivan was rescued from a country home 40 miles out of Moscow.

Don’t ask Kaspersky if he is a billionaire. His company has net sales of around $700 million, which equates to billions of Russian rubles. He has a nice house. But he’s quiet about his private life, and that includes his love life and his personal finances.

He’s not quiet about internet security.

Kasper, as staffers call him, walks into his office carrying the front nose of a cracked-up Formula 1 Ferrari. Japanese driver Kamui Kobayashi wrecked it on July 22 on a wet track in Moscow. Kaspersky sponsors him. Not surprisingly, a half dozen employees dressed more formally than the boss, gather around like he’s caught a large toad and they want to see it croak.

“You know, Interpol is opening up a new center in Singapore where they’ll be using technology to track criminals. This is very bad news for cyber gangs,” he says as people zig-zag out of his office like it’s a busy airport. There are still unopened boxes on the floor. They moved in only a few months ago. “We can outsource global prisons for cyber criminals to Siberia.” He chuckles at his own jokes.

What’s Interpol up to?

Interpol’s Global Complex for Innovation (IGCI) opens in September, with a special focus on cyber crime. Kaspersky Lab has not developed any specific products for Interpol, but the two are joining forces in other ways. This is Eugene’s task. He’s like a one-man consultant for big organizations.

“When we told Eugene about this idea to focus on cyber crime, he said, ‘Great! I have been waiting for an internet Interpol for years and finally the time has come’,” says Noburu Nakatani, IGCI’s executive director.

“Eugene supported our idea to create a global hub to facilitate the prevention, investigation and prosecution of cyber criminals. We have been working together to make that vision a reality,” says Nakatani. “Every time I propose an idea to him or his team, their answers are always positive and professional. I don’t think the word impossible exists in their vocabulary.”

Here’s a word for the Kaspersky vocabulary: “internetistans”. Kaspersky predicted in December that our hyper connected world was at a real risk of breaking off into separate internet networks: a closed Russian internet, an American internet, a Chinese one.

Cyber crime and – to some extent – official espionage has poked holes in the net’s traditional open door policy. Nasty bugs are flying through that web now, and cyber security firms like Kaspersky Lab aren’t catching them. If they were, hackers would have a harder time breaching Facebook and Target. Many of those malware writers come from Russia, a country that has made cyber crime as cool as the garage band.

Kasperky Lab is Eugene’s life. He throws money around like water at a spring break wet T-shirt contest. On New Year’s Eve, employees rehearse to put on an annual show. Once, Lab techies spent half a year training to do a circus act. Some people sing. But no one gets shot from a cannon in clown make up. And there’s no slide or Star Wars memorabilia floating around the office.

The office in Moscow isn’t as playful as its owner, but Kaspersky Lab is the Russian Google. Young and fun and expanding like a galaxy after the big bang. There is no Russian company held in as high regard as this one.

“Eugene Kaspersky has shown that you can run a well-known tech company from Russia,” says Dmitry Akhanov, CEO of Rusnano USA, a Russian venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. “He’s gone from a software security geek to the head of one of the most respected IT security companies in the world. He’s a great engineer, really,” Akhanov says. “A visionary.”