Anita Joseph caught up with Eugene Kaspersky, Founder and CEO of Kaspersky, during the inauguration.
Kaspersky Transparency Center, the first of its kind in the Middle East, was inaugurated in Riyadh on Sunday by His Excellency Engineer Haitham bin Abdul Rahman Al-Ohali, Saudi Arabia’s Vice Minister of Communications and Information Technology, in the presence of officials from the ministry, the company, and several technology industry veterans. The launch is an essential part of Kaspersky’s Global Transparency Initiative, a flagship program committed to building trust and assuring the integrity of the company’s solutions and processes.
The Kaspersky Global Transparency Initiative includes a number of actionable and concrete measures to engage with the wider cybersecurity community and stakeholders to validate and verify the trustworthiness of its products, internal processes and business operations.
Kaspersky identified Riyadh as the venue for the region’s first Transparency Center, to align closely with the goals of “Saudi Vision 2030.” The vision aims to promote the Kingdom’s position as a hub for technology and innovation, and has transformed the country into a destination to attracts global companies to establish their regional headquarters in Riyadh.
Visitors to the Transparency Center in Riyadh can review the source code of all of Kaspersky on-premise solutions. The whole review process depends on the level of sophistication and follows “piste” skiing classification color codes – “blue”, “red”, and “black”. “Blue piste” offers a general overview of the security development processes of Kaspersky products and services, as well as data management procedures. “Red piste” allows a review of the most critical aspects of source code, assisted by the company’s specialists, and provides a targeted analysis of a particular functionality. “Black piste” enables visitors to conduct the most comprehensive source code review, with the help of Kaspersky’s experts.
Commenting on the company’s further developments in the region, Eugene Kaspersky, Founder and CEO of Kaspersky, said:
“This year we celebrate the five-year anniversary of our Global Transparency Initiative. As true pioneers in advancing digital trust, we are pleased to celebrate the arrival of this initiative in the Middle East region, which is witnessing rapid digital transformation. In order to enhance our partners’ confidence in the services we provide to them, we are pleased to welcome them to the newly opened Transparency Center in Riyadh to answer any questions about the nature of our work and our solutions.”
“No other cybersecurity provider has done anything as far reaching as this. In opening its Transparency Centers, Kaspersky takes a significant step towards becoming completely transparent about its protection technologies, infrastructure and data processing practices,” he added.
Eugene also said the Transparency Center served to strengthen Kaspersky’s commitment to cyber immunity. “Cyber Immunity works by separating the IT system into isolated parts and controlling the interactions between them. Most attacks on the Cyber Immune system are ineffective — it continues to perform critical functions even in an aggressive environment and stops potential attackers in their tracks. Kaspersky’s Cyber Immune approach is a means to create solutions that are virtually impossible to compromise and that minimize the number of potential vulnerabilities,” he added.
