Eugene Kaspersky on shifting security, spying and geopolitics

What do you do if you uncover state spying?

If it's [found] working for a customer, we must ask can we disclose this information or not. If they agree to disclose this information, we do. If not, unfortunately we must be silent about it. In some cases, we can see there's something anomalous going on ourselves, and we find it and we analyse it, we find the victims and report the victims not directly to the victim, but to the nation's organisation responsible for security so we share the information. But, we share only the pieces of information that are related to that nation, we don't share everything to everyone.

How much do you have to consider politics?

We stay away from politics we do our best to stay away. If we find an attack that looks like it's state sponsored we don't care if it's in Russian, Chinese or American English or broken English.

How much harder does politics make it to sell your services especially given the cold relations between Russia and the UK right now?

It's not really harder because our products are the best. [laughs] For individuals, small businesses and medium sized businesses, in some cases there are delays, or short term issues like there was in Turkey, but it's getting better. That's geopolitics. How many years ago there was the situation between the US and France? And Americans stopped consuming French products?

It takes time, and we do our best not to be connected [to one country] to be international. We have Russian roots, but Russia is also the best place for engineers they're the best and they're not so expensive.