This man’s sport is fighting the bad guys
NOPE, HE’S NOT PART OF THE AVENGERS, BUT EUGENE KASPERSKY IS BUSY PLAYING A GAME WITH $500 BILLION A YEAR ON THE LINE
For a man hailing from Russia — a country that has big interest in chess and has given us some of the world’s greatest players — you would have expected Eugene Kaspersky to at least put some spunk in his answer on whether he was good in the sport.
“No…” he says, his voice tapering off with a two-second ‘o’.
Though he says he plays a “couple of times a year,” apparently his most vivid memory of playing was with a “big guy” when he was a little boy.
“Of course, he wasn’t actually ‘playing’ with me; he was just moving [his chess pieces],” he tells in an exclusive interview, laughing while recalling that David-and-Goliath mismatch that caused him to feel uncomfortable and his opponent ashamed of busting out his best moves against a kid.
Fast-forward to today, and the founder, chairman and CEO of Kaspersky Lab is totally engaged in a unique sport: butting heads with cyber-criminals.
It was one day in 1989, while working for Russia’s Ministry of Defence, when the then-notorious Cascade virus infected his PC.
Anyone who would have experienced such an attack would naturally be ticked off. But Kaspersky took it so seriously that it not just compelled him to find some software to remove the Cascade virus — it stoked his interest to take on the entire cyber-underworld head-on.
“It changed my life completely,” he says, laughing while recalling the stress he endured at the beginning of his new career journey — the same stress that would inspire him to build a company that today protects over 400 million users and has more than $619 million in revenue.
“It pointed my life in a totally different direction.”
Kaspersky was in town recently, for the announcement of the 2017 World Chess Grand Prix in Sharjah, which will be held from February 18 to 27.
It was at this point that he revealed that — since chess didn’t work out for him — the sport he loves so dearly doesn’t exactly involve friendly competition and sportsmanship.
“My sport is my business,” he points out. “Fighting with cyber-crime — and it’s not just a sport for me; it’s my life.”
His entire team at Kaspersky Lab are his teammates. And along with the rest of the cyber-security industry, he alluded to the whole thing as a team
‘Virus’ sounds so primitive already. Today we use other terms — cyber-attack, malicious code — but simply put, it’s crime. So please, don’t call it a virus anymore. Eugene Kaspersky
sport: us versus them (cyber-criminals).
Good guys versus bad guys. Home team against visitors — unwanted visitors, matter of factly (!)
And like any sport, you need to have the right strategy and outwit your opponents to secure victory. Not that it’s that easy, though. “Thanks to that Cascade virus, it showed me the world of cyber-security,” Kaspersky recalls, adding that the entirely new game he was plunged into was, right off the bat, as tough as the NBA Playoffs or the knockout stages of the Fifa World Cup.
Win or go home. Or, more aptly, win or lose money and/or valuable data.
The global impact thanks to cybercrime expertise is valued at half-atrillion dollars, Kaspersky says. That’s about one-third more than the UAE’s GDP in 2015.
And he doesn’t want to accept the term ‘virus’ anymore. With everything evolving he wants to describe it as another five-letter word: “crime”.
“‘Virus’ sounds so primitive already,” he says. “Today we use other terms — cyber-attack, malicious code — but simply put, it’s crime.”
It’s gone from bad to worse, he adds; before, a virus was just like “artificial life” residing inside computer systems. But today, it has spawned a life of its own.
“So please,” he says, almost begging, “don’t call it a ‘virus’ anymore.”
Kaspersky’s life, like many high-profile executives, has been one that’s always on-the-go. Though he still manages to have time for his family, it’s not enough.
“Sometimes I would be with them in Moscow for a week or two,” he says, “then one day I’d say bye to them, bags and luggage in hand already.”
Talk about having to play games as part of a visiting team.
And what could have Kaspersky been had that Cascade virus never infected his PC back in 1989?
“I don’t know,” he sincerely quips. “There could have been some other projects that would have interested me — but it’s not possible to go back in time and try again. I really don’t know.
And while it’s safe to say that he would have “played” a different “sport,” his childhood experience could make us quite possibly sure that he would have never been a professional chess player.
alvin@khaleejtimes.com