Eugene Kaspersky has a keen interest in aerospace and astronomy. During his visit to ETH Zurich, the Russian IT entrepreneur was still visibly fascinated by Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, and Brian May, guitarist of the legendary rock group Queen, who is also an astrophysicist, after meeting both of them shortly before at the Starmus Festival in Zurich.
"Eugene Kaspersky is a legend, too", said ETH President Joël Mesot when he introduced the guest at ETH. Perhaps in a rather less spectacular field – cybersecurity – but one that is becoming increasingly important.
In the space of 20 years Kaspersky, who studied mathematics and physics, has built up a globally leading security software company.
Beatrice Lombard-Martin, President of the Swiss Russian Chamber of Commerce & Industry, which partnered with ETH Global to facilitate the visit, called him a builder of bridges between the Swiss and Russian science and technology sectors.
Online bank robbery
In his lecture, Kaspersky drew a picture of the current state of cybercrime and his strategy for addressing it. He said that malware falls into three groups. The first comprises programs with comparatively low complexity, but what makes them stand out is their sheer numbers: in 2018, Kaspersky registered some 380,000 new malicious scripts every day worldwide. “There is an enormous amount of work to be done in the fight against malware, and more engineers are needed. This field holds great opportunities for graduates of your university, too,” Kaspersky said.
The second, far more dangerous category is highly sophisticated attacks. While governments are behind 90 percent of these attacks, 10 percent are of a criminal nature, Kaspersky said, with the latter normally aimed at extorting money. “These hackers – most of them highly trained engineers – are becoming more and more professional,” he said. As an example, he cited the Carbanak case: between 2013 and 2015, cunning Russian cybercriminals succeeded in hacking global banking systems by infecting bank employees’ computers and slipping into their roles, enabling them to make off with a reported one billion dollars.
