Kaspersky planning for growth in the Middle East

The 10th annual Kaspersky Virus Analyst Summit is underway in Dubrovnik, Croatia, with a focus on increasing the transparency of the company, providing an overview of IT security and analysing the latest trends in the malware industry.
Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of the company which bears his name, explained that the anti-malware vendor is planning for growth in the Middle East, with long-term plans to boost the existing partner network and presence in the region.
The news follows on from last month’s announcement that Kaspersky is pursuing enterprise customers and furthers the company’s aims for global growth from 2008.
Delivering the keynote address, Roel Schouwenberg, senior regional researcher for the Americas and the global research and analytics team at Kaspersky, outlined the risks faced by failing to keep security programs up to date and operating systems adequately patched.

Schouwenberg also presented data on the most vulnerable applications, with Apple QuickTime taking up the first two slots, followed by Sun’s Java JDK/SRE, Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Word’s Smart Tags.
The Russia-based company also revealed that the damage caused by malware is running at over US $100 billion per year, according to company spokesperson Timur Tsoriev, head of the technology PR group at Kaspersky.
During the summit, Kaspersky screened a presentation on the company’s inner-workings at the head office in Moscow, where it was revealed that new instances of malware are detected every two seconds.