 I'm here at Telecom World 2012 in Dubai, and I'm very pleased to be joined by Eugene Kaspersky, who is CEO and founder of Kaspersky Lab. Eugene, thank you very much for being with us today. Yeah, welcome. And it's a pleasure to talk to you, and I'm really proud to be here at such a great event, and especially in times of the changing landscape of cyber threats. I was going to ask you about that. There's been a great deal of transformation in the ICT industry. I wanted to ask you about the changes in the landscape of cyber security, and also with regards to the level of threats that we might experience. Yeah, unfortunately, we see that the landscape of the threats, the ICT threats, has been changed, and unfortunately it's going on quite quickly. So it started just about 20 years ago with quite a primitive computer viruses, which were written mostly by kids, teenagers, which they were proving themselves in the ICT world with quite a primitive computer viruses. Kids don't write viruses anymore, they play computer games, so they were replaced with criminals, which were developing malware and cyber threats just because of their financial reasons, and still they do quite a lot. And then the cyber crime transformed to the organized crime. So I don't want to say mafia, no. It's a little bit different. Tradition crime and cyber crime, they have a distance in between. But cyber crime now is economy. It's different organizations, gangs, individuals, which are connected. So it's a very big economy. But it's not the end of the story. The hacktivists came to this area, and unfortunately the hacktivists are now one of the most serious problems in the ICT security. And now we see that there are more and more attacks, which we can call cyber sabotage. Attacks on industrial systems, attacks on critical IT infrastructure, attacks on the internet itself. You know the cases of Estonia, and that happened once with South Korea in 2003, and the whole country was disconnected from the internet. So unfortunately it came from the kid's toys to... Well, there's still no definition of cyber terrorism. But as I understand it, it's very, very, very close to cyber terrorism. And what about the worst-case scenarios? What could we be most afraid of, do you think? I'm very right man to ask this question, because I'm thinking about the worst-case scenarios all the time. And I'm afraid the situation is very, very serious, because we depend on IT. Computers are everywhere. Do you know how many computers you use in your daily life? It's like when you drive a car, when you go to the hotel, well, I'm staying in the hotel at the moment, so you go to the hotel, press there, they call the elevator, so which elevator comes first? It's computer system as well. Planes, transportation, power grid. So, this world is managed by computers. And it's getting more and more close to matrix. So, we depend on computer systems. They are everywhere. Unfortunately, the systems are vulnerable. And we had already, we had examples of critical attacks, like attack on Estonia, the whole country was disconnected. Stuxnet, attack on the SCADA system. Aramco, attack on the critical IT infrastructure. So, I think these three scenarios, the worst-case scenarios. Attack on industrial systems, including transportation, power plants, what else. Attacks on the critical IT infrastructure. And attacks on the networks. Internet, mobile networks, maybe some very specific networks, which we don't know about. These three scenarios are maybe the worst-case scenarios. And unfortunately, there could be their collateral damage. So, they're random victims because it's Internet. No borders, no distance, no time. So, you press button here, and they're somewhere far, far, far, far away from you. There are a thousand computers at that. IT systems, they are very similar. So, it's the same operating systems. It's the same industrial environment, the same networks. So, there could be random infections. The result of such an attack. I'm afraid the successful, professional, global IT attack could... I think it easily can get us back to the pre-electric time. I call it romantic scenario. Candles, horses, paper-printed emails, handwritten. Right. So, very briefly, how can economies achieve digital resilience in this hyper-connected world? Well, there are some ideas. There are ways how to make this world more safe, more secure. And there are good news and bad news at the same time. So, there are ways how to make it. There are technologies. There are products which are almost ready, which can protect industrial systems, for example. There are IT strategies how to make your network, if we're talking about critical IT infrastructure, to make the network more stable and to have a backup network, maybe in some cases, because if the main network is broken, so we have to switch to the second one. Talking about the network attacks on Internet or mobile system, there are some technologies, there are some ideas how to make it to be protected. But it's just one side of this issue. I think that the second part of the solution is international cooperation. It's an agreement between governments not to use cyber weapons. Also, agreement to investigate incidents. Because if there are states behind the attacks, it's possible to agree not to use it anymore. But if there are activists or traditional terrorists behind the attacks, I'm afraid it's very difficult to talk to them. So, there have to be a cooperation between different governments, between states and regions to investigate, to find who is behind it and better to find it before the attack. So, the good news is that we have ideas and we have partly solutions. Partly we have solutions. The bad news is that the IT systems, they're everywhere. There are cameras here. They're computers as well. Everyone has a computer in the pocket, maybe two computers in the pocket. How many computers in the cars? It's everywhere. So, the bad news is that to redesign the computer system in a secure way, it's done complicated and expensive. If we say that, okay, we have a plan that within five or ten years we have to rebuild, redesign all the computer stuff in a secure way, the IT security engineers, the software engineers will be paid as football stars. Because it's not enough, not enough people to redo all the work which was done within the last 20, 30, 50 years. Because computers are everywhere. So, I am paranoid and optimistic at the same time. I am paranoid because all the time I'm thinking about worst case scenarios. I'm optimistic because there are solutions, there are strategies you have to make this world more safe, more secure. And I'm double happy because I'm working in IT security industry. I'm kidding. I understand. And finally, we're here at ITU Telecom World 2012. Why do you think this event is important? Well, talking about the IT innovations about IT development from the corner of cybersecurity, because I'm sitting in the corner of cybersecurity. I'm watching the world from there. This event is extremely important because there are more and more people, governments, businesses, enterprises, they understand IT security issues on a very, very, very high level. No surprise that presidents, prime ministers, they're talking about cyber threats. That's why for me, for my company, for my business, and for me personally, this event is extremely important because this is one more opportunity to just share my ideas, to share my paranoia, to explain the worst case scenarios and to find the right partners, how to make this world more safe, more secure, and have to save the cyber world, which is a mission of my company, my personal mission. Eugene Kaspersky, thank you very much for being with us today.