Found Kaspersky Lab when it was asked by a bank to investigate why its cash machines had taken on a life of their own...now close to 1 Bn in revenues...and perhaps the country's best-known brand after vodka and AK-47s.
Kaspersky Lab has repeatedly impressed sceptics by exposing genuine and serious cyber-security problems. First it released a report detailing how a gang it calls Carbanak had hacked the computer systems of banks around the world. It said the gang had stolen several hundred million dollars by moving money to fake accounts and making cash machines dispense their contents. The same day the firm said it had discovered the "Equation Group", apparently part of the NSA, which it said was able to embed spyware in computers that gives it total control over them, even after the hard disk has been erased and the operating system reinstalled. Founded in 1997 in Moscow, the company now has offices in 30 countries, 3,000 employees and 400m users, and had $667m in sales in 2013.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/russian-cyber-security-company-2015-2
