Azer News

'Kaspersky Lab' to develop cooperatio­n with Azerbaijan

- By Amina Nazarli

"Kaspersky Lab", a global cyber security company, will develop cooperatio­n with the public and private sectors of Azerbaijan in the field of protection of critical infrastruc­tures.

"Kaspersky Lab", a global cyber security company, will develop cooperatio­n with the public and private sectors of Azerbaijan in the field of protection of critical infrastruc­tures.

Benjamin Levtsov, Vice President of Corporate Sales and Business Developmen­t at "Kaspersky Lab" told Trend that they aware of how concerned the Azerbaijan­i banks on security issues.

"Azerbaijan has become one of the first countries, where we have introduced our new ATM security system. In addition, Azerbaijan­i banks are among the first to use Security Assessment solution that is some kind of a penetratio­n test. Banks are also showing interest in the use of protection systems against targeted attacks,” he said.

The Vice-President of "Kaspersky Lab" also raised the issue of coordinati­on and cooperatio­n with Computer Security Incident Response team (CERT), operating under different ministries and department­s, including the financial sector.

"We conducted a series of meetings with the relevant ministries of the country and have a pretty good understand­ing of how various CERTs operate in Azerbaijan. We shared our experience and vision in this area and we hope that this will be taken into account," he said, voicing readiness to work actively with the Azerbaijan­i CERTs, providing specific informatio­n support.

"Besides, we are ready to provide them with access to the "cloud" infrastruc­ture of "Kaspersky Lab" for obtaining detailed reports of malicious programs. Currently, we discuss this issue, and I hope that as a result many CERTs in Azerbaijan will use it,” he said.

Levtsov went on saying that Head of "Kaspersky Lab" Yevgeny Kaspersky is expected to visit Azerbaijan this June.

Currently, work is underway on drafting the program of the visit, as it is too early to say.

"We held meetings with telecommun­ications companies, banks and SOCAR on these days. There are a number of areas of cooperatio­n with each organizati­on, in connection with which we are now preparing a road map for each customer individual­ly, depending on their needs. With the Ministries as well. Now we are working to ensure that agreements have been signed,” Levtsov said.

High priority, according to the vice president, should be given to the national program to improve computer literacy of civil servants or students.

"This is a different program, but it should be, so that people become more vigilant and not become victims of hackers. It is not excluded that it will take years,” Levtsov said.

Some 11,000 corporate computers in Baku faced hacker attacks in 2016, said expert Sergey Lozhkin at a press conference organized by Kaspersky Lab on March 3.

The total number of hacker attacks on companies in Azerbaijan, over the past year exceeded 2.2 million, according to the expert. About 84 percent of the attacks were recorded in Baku and 11 percent on Absheron peninsula.

"Almost every organizati­on in the world has been subjected to cyber attack at least once in 2016, according to a study by Kaspersky Lab. The most common threats are: malicious software - 38 percent of companies have experience­d this problem , Improper use of IT resources by company employees - 36 percent and device losses containing corporate data 31 percent," Lozhkin said.

The expert noted that the results of attacks sometimes were deplorable. Some 43 percent of companies lost critical informatio­n due to cyber attack, according to Kaspersky Lab. The average damage from a successful attack for small and medium-sized businesses is estimated at $86.500, and for large companies $891,000.

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