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HANNOVER – The soon-to-be-operational Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” jet aircraft is vulnerable to a hacker attack, said Kaspersky Lab CEO and founder Eugene Kaspersky during a press conference here today. Kaspersky used the jetliner’s potential problems as an illustration of how vulnerabilities are showing up in unexpected places. In the case of the 787, Kaspersky said that the aircraft is designed with a passenger data network. He pointed out that as it’s currently designed, there are links between the aircraft’s flight control network and the passenger network. “A passenger could be flying the plane,” he said.
During a press conference intended to announce the release of Kaspersky Lab’s release of its Windows Server Enterprise Edition anti-virus product, version 6.0, and its mobile security central management console, Kaspersky said that the types and aims of malicious software, of malware, are changing for the worse. He demonstrated this by showing pricing sheets for rental periods on botnets, development costs for creating custom designed Trojans (complete with discounts for multiple Trojan buys), and a new concept in malware, botnets as a service.
Kaspersky said that the result is a new type of business-to-business software infrastructure that he refers to as criminal-to-criminal business software. “The IT security threat problem is not solved,” Kaspersky said. He noted that companies globally are spending $15 billion annually to invest in anti-malware efforts but are losing $13.3 billion annually in infrastructure damage. “And that doesn’t count the actual financial losses,” he said.
Kaspersky noted that his company has grown from a start in 10 years to the largest provider of threat-protection technologies and products in Europe, the dominant provider in Russia and the CIS, and that he’s already achieved a 10-percent share of the U.S. market. Kaspersky also noted that his channel partners played a significant aspect in his company’s growth. He said that in addition to selling anti-malware and other protective products, Kaspersky Lab is also licensing its technology to a wide range of other companies including Microsoft.
But Kaspersky warned that the worst is yet to come. He cited the emergence of professional cybercriminals, more complex and sophisticated malware and new efforts at social engineering as things companies needed to be on the lookout for. He also said that the industry in moving into hybrid technology – products that use multiple approaches to detect and protect against threats, and that automatic malware processing is starting to appear.
– Wayne Rash