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The CEO of Kaspersky Lab told PC Pro he believes recent reports reflect prejudices rather than reality.

"It's a kind of propaganda," he lamented in an exclusive interview at the weekend. "It's just keeping up the standard perception that Russians are hackers. There is all this noise about the Russian Business Network, but there are ten, twenty, maybe fifty criminal networks around the world. For sure, the number one source of malware is China, and second is Latin America. Russian-speaking nations are third, but this includes Ukraine, the Baltic nations, Kazakhstan and other former Soviet republics."

While acknowledging that every country has its criminals, Kaspersky argues that Russian developers have little need to resort to crime. "Russian developers are well-paid," he told us: "programmers in Moscow and St. Petersburg earn more than programmers in Germany, Spain or Italy. And they are highly-skilled, as the Russian government has invested heavily in education - particularly technical education, during the Cold War," he admits.

Lingering Mistrust

But while the Cold War may be officially over, mistrust lingers on both sides. It was alleged only last week that the Russian authorities were blocking Western attempts to investigate a Russian criminal gang believed to be behind the Storm worm that infected millions of machines last year. And while Kaspersky is rolling out hosted security services

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- including offsite email scanning - across Europe, it remains to be seen whether Western businesses will be happy to route their communications through a Russian company.

Kaspersky laughs off suggestions that the new services could be used for espionage. "We could never do that," he explains. "There are thousands of hackers who attack and analyse our code. If there were anything wrong with our software, sooner or later that would be disclosed and it would be a disaster for the company."

"Trust is a problem for companies of both blocs - West and East. People in the West ask if they can trust Russian software: here in Russia people ask if they can trust American products such as Windows. But our technologies are already used by companies such as MessageLabs and BlackSpider."

Political Interference

What about the possibility of political interference? Last year saw multiple reports of the US government requiring American online service providers to hand over customers' private data. Could the Kremlin undermine Kaspersky's international credibility with similar demands?

"I think we will never have that problem," he says with a smile. "We are seen as a national brand, a Russian company that grew from nothing into an international business. And the Russian government supports national brands, that's for sure."

"Of course," he adds, "we must obey local laws. If the police ask us to give them the emails of a certain suspect, we must do that. But that's not just Russia - it's the same everywhere, and I see nothing wrong here. If the data is in another territory, it requires the permission of the government of that country. So we offer hosted services in countries where we have a presence, where we have offices, and we have their hosting in that country only."

"But then", he concludes with cheerful frankness, "What about pan-European companies? Global companies? It's tricky. I will have to check with our lawyers!"