In-depth

Eugene Kaspersky on the cyber jungle

Steve Cassidy braves the tech jungle that is CeBIT to hear the security guru give some sage advice.

11 Mar 2014

OPINION: Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of Kaspersky Lab. You'd be hard pushed to find a more bubbly, cheerful and occasionally explosive presenter on the depressing, inescapable and often implausible field of cyber security. Then again, I guess he should be pretty jolly, since he's in the business of plugging the leaks, Wiki or otherwise, in companies and home-user computer networks.

You don't really want to come to this show and go away feeling that this is all business-as-usual, safe and standard company IT.

Kaspersky was presenting at this year's CeBIT exhibition, in Hannover. Or rather, he was presenting in one of the more corporate parts of the show you can't really think of it as a single event with a single audience. There are halls for mainframe buyers, halls for software companies, halls for gamers, halls for home automation, routers and internet access and so on. Indeed, there's even a printer and folder-stapler machine hall.

Naturally, this results in the occasional bizarre intermix, with gamer kids staring in horror at eight-rotor carbon-fibre octocopters [pic below], or software developers who wander by mistake into the Chinese Mainland wooden iPhone case aisle (no word of a lie).

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Feeling a little incredulous? That's good. You don't really want to come to this show and go away feeling that this is all business-as-usual, safe and standard company IT. CeBIT is something of an annual barometer for trends in computing and, in line with other shows and invites we've had at IT Pro, there's a distinct flavour here of the recession being well and truly over and done with.

Lots of crazy robots with little tethers running back to massive racks of controlling servers: lots of people of a rather older sort, who disappear with great regularity into the apparently infinite series of private meeting rooms.