Eugene Kaspersky — tech (antivirus) with roots in the USSR
Eugene Valentinovich Kaspersky was born on 4 October 1965 in Novorossiysk, a Black Sea port in the Russian SFSR. At sixteen he was admitted to the technical faculty of the KGB Higher School in Moscow, which trained mathematicians and cryptographers and is now the Institute of Cryptography, Telecommunications and Computer Science, and graduated in 1987. He then served as an officer in the Soviet army, rising to senior lieutenant and working as a cryptographer and software engineer; according to his company, he never served in the KGB or its successor, the FSB.
His interest in computer security began in 1989, when his work computer was infected with the Cascade virus. Using his training in cryptography, he analysed the encrypted virus and wrote a program to remove it, and went on to collect and classify viruses and write disinfection modules for them. From 1991 to 1997 he worked at the KAMI Information Technologies Centre in Moscow, where with a small team he developed the AntiViral Toolkit Pro, released in 1992; in 1994 a comparative study at the University of Hamburg ranked it first among anti-virus programs. His future wife, Natalya, joined him at KAMI.
In 1997 Kaspersky, Natalya Kaspersky and his colleague Alexey De-Monderik left KAMI to found Kaspersky Lab in Moscow. Natalya was chief executive, while Eugene headed research and technology for the company's first ten years; the product was later renamed Kaspersky Anti-Virus after the AVP trademark was registered by another company in the United States. In 2007 he became chief executive. Under his leadership the company grew into one of the world's largest private vendors of endpoint security, with a holding company in the United Kingdom, and its researchers took part in identifying several state-sponsored cyber-espionage campaigns. The company has some 4,000 employees, and he holds an honorary doctorate of science from the University of Plymouth.
In June 2024 the US Department of Commerce banned the sale of Kaspersky software in the United States, and the Treasury sanctioned twelve of the company's executives; the Treasury stated that it had not designated the company, its parent or its chief executive. He continues to lead the company from Moscow.
"Kaspersky has remained Russia-based, expanding globally from Moscow headquarters post-USSR."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Novorossiysk, Krasnodar Krai (Russia)
Born in Novorossiysk in 1965, he trained as a cryptographer in Moscow, graduating in 1987 from the technical faculty of the KGB Higher School (now the Institute of Cryptography, Telecommunications and Computer Science), and founded Kaspersky Lab in Moscow in 1997.
Novorossiysk, Krasnodar Krai (Russia). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.