‘EU strongly backed us amid US spy claims’: Kaspersky Lab boss on friends, hackers & cyber-awareness

The US crusade against Kaspersky Lab has revealed that the Russian anti-virus company has many friends in the EU, including Germany, France, and Belgium, who value its high-quality cybersecurity products, Eugene Kaspersky told RT.

Without providing any proof, the US Department of Homeland Security accused Kaspersky Lab of ties to Russian intelligence in late 2017, and forbade all US government agencies from using its software.

The European Commission initially sided with Washington on the issue, but internal pressure from some of the member states made it change its stance this April, saying that it was “not in possession of any evidence regarding potential issues related to the use of Kaspersky Lab products.”

In the end, as a result of US persecution, Kaspersky Lab “learned that we have many friends in different countries. We had very strong support from the French government; from Germany; from the European Commission; from the Belgian Prime Minister [Charles Michel] and few other sources,” Eugene Kaspersky said.

We are happy that we have so many friends and the technology that is respected by the market in any part of the world.

The Kaspersky Lab founder and CEO also made fun of the reports about “Russian hackers,” who were turned into boogeymen by the mainstream media in America and the UK.

“We live in Russia and we are the first to see those ‘Russian hackers.’ So our technologies and products protect from Russian hackers much better than those of our competitors,” he laughed.

Kaspersky assured that the crackdown in the US never made the company question its strategies and search for new markets.

“There was no need for Plan B. We’re working on our technologies and products; we’re investing in new projects,” he said, promising that “we want to be and we will be the best cybersecurity company in the world.”

There’s a lot of work ahead for Kaspersky Lab because, despite the fact that the cyber-awareness of individuals, companies, and governments has drastically increased in recent years, they still “mostly think about computer and smartphone security.”

“But there are all kinds of devices around us and, unfortunately, many of them are vulnerable. What about transportation security, healthcare security?”

“The bad guys are sometimes able to hack those critical things,” Kaspersky said, adding that the people must be informed of this danger and provided with tools to avert it.

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