Eugene Kaspersky tells the INQ where to get off

EUGENE KASPERSKY is on a whirlwind tour of the UK, as he prepares to address the Infosec conference here in London this week.

Fresh from an invigorating tour of China where he says Kaspersky Labs is now the top security vendor, the genial blue-eyed Russian outlined to the INQ his view of the topography of the type of threats mysterious malware writers are preparing for you.

While the Chinese, he says, are currently top of the pile in terms of organised criminal activity on the web, the south Americans and Russians follow up with their own distinctive blend of naughtiness, while the North Americans favour dropping spyware in web-based advertising.

Kaspersky estimates that 70 per cent of malware now originates from China, where they cheeky blighters are after your data, preparing to open up your backdoors, combing for financial data and, most particularly, your virtual identity and any virtual lucre you may have stashed away in virtual worlds.

Those pesky Latin Americans specialise in financial Trojans to sniff out your bank details while the Russians specialise in Proxy Trojans to be used to send you spam.

Don't you deal in fear, though, through perpetual security alerts? we asked, innocently. We were rebuffed. Most of Kaspersky's customers, he said, come to him after they've been stung. "People buy from us not because they are scared but because they have already been hit," said Eugene.

Why don't we hear of virus writers being arrested, we wanted to know. Don't you, of all people, know who they are?

"They are arrested," he claimed. "In 2004 around 100 were arrested. In 2005, a few hundreds were arrested. In 2006, again around 100 were arrested. 2005 was a bad year for malware writers."

Vista, he said, won't make much difference to the webscape. While it is more secure than XP, there are, currently, few third-party companies producing protection for Vista. XP may be leakier but there are at least lots of companies trying to plug its holes.

Aren't the malware writers essential allies of the industry, we suggested. That is, if they didn't exist, we wouldn't have update our hardware all the time to keep pace with all the security software we have to run. There would be no market for the hundreds of security products out there and you, too, would out of a job.

"Someone switch this guy off," he pleaded. µ