Tag Archives: saint petersburg

People often ask me what I talk about these days at the numerous conferences I speak at around the world.

Most of my talks aren’t deep technical dives or analyses of specific cyberattacks. For those, our experts give detailed presentations at specialized events, and publish articles in cybersecurity media. I usually provide a broad overview: discussing what’s happening in the world of cybersecurity, the pressing issues, and where everything’s headed. I almost always have a basis, or template, which I generally adapt for a particular audience or event…

For example, in this post let me share what I discussed at a recent conference of ours in St. Petersburg.

Since the conference was called “Cybersecurity of the Future”, I gave cybersecurity forecasts: what threats we’ll face, and how we’ll tackle them. But before that, as is customary for me, I first gave a brief historical overview of IT-villainy – “from Adam to… Telegram”.

Cybercrime: how did it all start?

So why do we need to dive into the archaeological past and the relics of various malware? Well, because if you don’t know the past, you can’t predict the future. So we look back to events of the past so we can analyze what’s happening here and now and why. Moreover, we’ve been known to be rather good at accurately predicting future cyber-scenarios (more on this below). So let’s roll back around 20-25 years, and remember how the computer mischief of the late 20^th century turned into a whole industry of international crime – and a serious problem for humanity on a whole.

Read on…

Hi folks!

…And for us it was hi St. Pete!

But, why does everyone always complain about how gloomy and rainy this city is? Every time I’m there – it’s all bright sunshine and blue skies! ->

We’re still in the thick of our hot season – packed with conferences, expos, meetings, and all kinds of other work-related stuff – plus a ton of travel around the globe. Early last week we wrapped up our global partner conference in Istanbul, while on Wednesday to Friday we had our Kaspersky Future Conference up in St. Petersburg for our major enterprise customers. It was a totally new format for us – we’d never done anything on such a scale before – but it worked out great: zero teething problems, or, as we say in Russia, the first pancake wasn’t a flop!

It all took place in downtown St. Pete, at the Astoria Hotel:

We brought together almost 250 folks from 130+ companies, and there were nearly 30 talks (less than half of which were ours – most came from the guests). I took to the stage too and shared my predictions about the future of cyber-nastiness. Sadly, the outlook’s grim…

But if you’re thorough in setting up the right processes and protocols, you can bring the risk of cyberattacks down to practically zero – and finally get a good night’s sleep :)

On top of that, we ran several workshops on incident investigation and other topics in our field:

During breaks, people mingled in the main area – something like this:

We also picked up some pretty colorful terms from the talks:

• Not just “threats” – but “black swans”
• “Ripe tomatoes”: we all want to be ripe tomatoes, not green ones
• Internal DDoS attack during an antivirus update :)
• Talking to IT is like making a deal with the devil // from the cybersecurity POV
• “Underbelly scanner” :)

It’s clear that information-security folks aren’t exactly popular, for we tend to get in the way of business-as-usual. Hence the rebranding of infosec departments: “Information Security Department”: ISD -> “Idiotic Sabotage Department”! Oh yes – very drole. But!… If you don’t do security (well), it’s only gonna be worse – way worse.

One nice little perk for me: since we’d brought a whole bunch of guests to both attend the conference at the Astoria and stay there too, the hotel management treated me to a luxury suite – (huge thanks to them!) ->

Honestly, I really don’t need such fancy digs, but if they’re offering – why not? And folks often ask me to show off some unique hotels and other lodgings. So here it is – this is what the Rachmaninoff Suite looks like:

Not bad, eh?

Luxurious!

The third room? Half-bar-half-library! ->

Views from the room:

To wrap things up – a shot from one of the restaurants hosting our evening bashes:

That’s it for St. Pete – time to head home! But it won’t be long till I’m back on the road once again!…

Hi folks!

Earlier this week I took a whirlwind trip up to St. Petersburg; however – I did not go on a walkabout around this particularly beautiful city. What?…

Sure, I normally get out and about in St. Pete, but that’s because I tend to go there during the summer months – or at least in spring or fall; rarely in the depths of winter. But I’m no fan of bad, wintry weather – all gray and damp and the days being real short. So, like I say – no walkies. But we had something else planned – indoors: a visit to the Hermitage! ->

First up: see these pics? All as per (historically significant, beautiful, intricate, grandiose, opulent…) – right? But there’s one thing missing; can you guess what?…

Come on… worked it out yet?

Read on…

Our working week up in St. Petersburg was finally coming to a close – and we decided we needed to finish it in suitable style. And when in the northern capital, that can mean only one thing: nighttime river-and-canal cruise! But of course: they don’t call it Venice of the North for nothing, you know )…

Sure, we’ve done it before – plenty. But of course we have. You can never have too many nighttime canal experiences here. And anyway – each time the colors and scenes in general are always slightly different; accordingly, out came the camera for much clackety-click, and – bonus! – the pics turned out to be much better than in previous years!…

Read on…

As you’ll probably be able to tell from my slew of St. Petersburg-themed posts of late (architecture tour, rooftop tour, bucking Bronka tour, Kronstadt tour) – our week in the northern capital was a busy, action-packed one. But it wasn’t over just yet. Still to come was a Cyber Immunity conference followed by a nocturnal boat excursion along the city’s canals and Neva River. In this post, I’ll go over the former…

Secure by design software development – it’s a real buzz-term of late: everyone’s on about it, especially in North America and Europe. And everyone keeps insisting that it’s really needed – but no one goes on to say quite how. Meanwhile in northwest Moscow…

We’ve long been using the term “secure by design” – not merely as an empty catchword with little substance to back it up, but together with detailed instructions for implementing it – including at our conferences on all things secure-by-design. And just the other week we put on our latest such conference – up in St. Petersburg, and which we now call… ->

Read on…

Still sticking around St. Petersburg, we saw it was time for a scene change. So we chose the forts of Kronstadt, since – to my shame – I’d never been and didn’t even know much about them, including their history. Thus, it was time for some Kronstadt forts history catch-up…

Kronstadt is a port city on the tiny Kotlin Island in Neva Bay in the Gulf of Finland some 30 kilometers west of St. Petersburg – here. But the name Kronstadt is also given to the collection of historic forts in Neva Bay, including the few in Kronstadt. Most of the forts were constructed in the early to mid-1700s, and there were 22 at one point (some were later demolished). The first forts appeared during the Great Northern War. The reason why they were built was simple: to protect the northern capital from enemy navies.

I mentioned some were demolished; alas – others were simply abandoned and left to decay, not before they were looted. Today plenty of ruins remain – in among the shrubbery and trees that have grown up in the intervening centuries. But “ruins” doesn’t mean uninteresting; quite the contrary in fact. Accordingly, off we popped toward the forts of Kronstadt…

Read on…

Saint Petersburg walkabout – done.

Saint Petersburg roof-about – done.

Next up, Port Bronka (here) – the new, modern (i.e., deep enough for modern monster-sized ships) port of the city (not to be confused with the nearby older Great Port of St. Petersburg), which happens to be a customer of ours (for all things cybersecurity, naturally) and with which we have a great relationship…

Read on…

Our guided walking-tour of St. Pete started out great. But things were about to be taken to the next level – literally! Rooftops, here we come. But first – a surprise: turns out most of the roofs are wooden (on the inside, under some tin sheeting)! ->

I have to say I wasn’t expecting this; from afar things like a lot more modern. Never mind. The main thing – the views from the roofs, not the (inner) roofs themselves.

Read on…

And now – for one of my favorite tourisms: a city walkabout! Even better – the city is St. Petersburg! Better still – with a wonderfully entertaining tour guide! Even better yet – the itinerary of sights and sounds around the city was interestingly unusual!…

All righty; off we pop!…

So what can I say? Well, I’ll start off by saying that Saint Petersburg in the summer is simply… sainted! Perhaps the most convincing imperial “capital” (it was the capital of the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire) of Europe, if not the world.

But, as often happens, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the beginning – of our guided stroll. First place of interest: the Rimsky-Korsakov Monument ->

Read on…

The other week a group of colleagues and I were up in St. Petersburg on business. And in among our busy schedule while there we paid a useful and informative visit to the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant. And it was there I got my first glimpse of Cherenkov radiation (and you thought radiation was invisible?), which I’d dreamed of doing for years. I also stood on the roof of a working reactor of RBMK (Reaktor Bolshoy Moshchnosti Kanalniy, meaning ‘high-power channel-type reactor’). An unforgettable experience!

Note: since there’s absolutely no photography allowed at any nuclear facility, the photos below are all taken from the internet.

So, the main thing: Cherenkov radiation. In case you haven’t clicked the link, here’s what it says about it on its Wikipedia page: ‘Cherenkov radiation is electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle (such as an electron) passes through a dielectric medium at a speed greater than the phase velocity (speed of propagation of a wave in a medium) of light in that medium’ (the links –added by me).

And you can actually see this wonder of physics – and beautiful it is too: a fluorescent blue in the core of a nuclear reactor in cooling fluid. The spectacle is a cosmically fantastic one…

(photos from Wikipedia and here)

Read on…>