Russian cybercrime-buster Eugene Kaspersky has an unusual hobby. The globally recognised cyber-expert makes a living collecting viruses from the internet. "Different people collect different things: some collect butterflies, some collect stamps. I collect viruses," he says, with a shrug of the shoulders.
The anti-virus guru was interviewed in Sandton on Tuesday where he was attending IT Web's conference on security. He predicts that by the end of the year there will be at least 20 million viruses swarming the internet. It is for this reason, he says, that internet security is of paramount importance. "Criminals are becoming more sophisticated and are able to steal from bank accounts, hijack data, encrypt text and take over online services that play on the stock exchange.
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"We have seen people play the stock exchange on their own sites and hack into other people's websites just so they could make more money," he says. "To protect computers from the likes of these characters is a high-end job, which we cannot do without knowing what cybercriminals are all about."
Kaspersky was in a jovial mood as he described his work and plans to make South Africans more security conscious while using the internet. "It's like a virtual game: sometimes we have parts of the puzzle from analysing the spam, but this is no good without understanding the business."
'Different people collect different things' Worm and Trojan were two of the worst viruses in recent times, causing chaos and deleting data on computers they have infected throughout the world. Last year there were about 2 million viruses on the internet. It is going to get worse, he warns, affecting the bottom line of business across the world.
"We have developed a project to stop spam easily, but to get to know the workings of a business can take us up to six months," he says.
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