Kaspersky Lab

Founded in 1997 by Eugene Kaspersky after he became fascinated with malware while working at the Soviet Ministry of Defense. In 1989, his computer was infected by the Cascade virus; instead of panicking, he reverse-engineered it and wrote removal tools. This hobby became a company protecting ~400 million users globally by 2016.

Kaspersky Lab's 35-year history exemplifies Red Queen co-evolution in cybersecurity. Defense strategies evolved from signature-based detection (1990s) to heuristic analysis (2000s) to machine learning (2010s) to adversarial AI (2020s). By 2024, systems analyze 100,000+ new malware samples daily - up from thousands in the 2000s.

In 2017, the U.S. government banned federal agencies from using Kaspersky software due to alleged Russian intelligence ties (never proven). The ban demonstrated how cybersecurity arms race dynamics extended into geopolitics, with trust becoming a casualty of great power competition.