King Kaspersky comes down under

Cybercrime fighter and antivirus king Eugene Kaspersky today announced he will visit Sydney in October to launch Kaspersky Lab's Australian office.

CEO: Eugene Kaspersky
(Credit: Kaspersky Lab)

Details are scant about the founder of Kaspersky Lab's visit; however, the company has confirmed he will be in Sydney from 14 October for three days to promote the antivirus company's new Melbourne-based office.

To date, Kaspersky Labs has used a third-party distributor to provide services for Australian consumers. Whether Kaspersky Lab intends to establish a virus research facility locally or just a sales office is unclear.

Earlier this year Kaspersky Lab branched away from its core antivirus business by launching a hosted email security service for European clients. At the time, Kaspersky Lab admitted that spending on antivirus was not growing, where as hosted email security was showing strong growth. The hosted service put it in direct competition with hosted messaging security companies MessageLabs and Sophos, however, Kaspersky Lab has not indicated whether it intends on offering the service in Australia.

Kaspersky himself was one of the first from the antivirus industry to herald the rise of whitelisting techniques to meet the shortcomings of signature-based blacklisting in the fight against malware. McAfee's CEO Dave De Walt soon followed suit, admitting to ZDNet.com.au that the explosion of malware had pushed blacklisting to its architectural limits.