Photos: Inside Kaspersky Lab's antivirus HQ

Photos: Inside Kaspersky Lab's antivirus HQ

A look at the Russian antivirus company's Moscow headquarters and virus-hunting labs.

• -#1- The software of Russian antivirus company Kaspersky Lab is used by 300 million people worldwide and by more than 200,000 organisations.
  The company's headquarters are situated in the Russian capital, Moscow, which also plays home to the company's antivirus labs.
  Kaspersky Lab has some 2,200 staff - around 1,500 of whom work at the HQ. Last month, silicon.com was able to take a tour of the facility.
• -#2- Pictured here is the door to the Research and Development Department, with its sign in Russian.
  Kaspersky Lab has about 800 staff working in research and development worldwide.
  The Moscow R&D department houses Kaspersky Lab's content- filtering group, which includes spam analysts, developers, parental control and anti-phishing units, totalling more than 50 workers.
• -#3- This is the virus lab. Kaspersky Lab affectionately calls its antivirus researchers 'woodpeckers', because their job is to peck bugs and worms out of software.
  Globally, Kaspersky Lab has around 100 staff in its anti-malware research team.
• -#4- The screens behind Alexey Malanov, head of malware stream control at Kaspersky Lab, show the number of virus samples received, which virus analyst is working on them, and how many updates have been sent out to customers to protect them against new variants.
• -#5- About 90 per cent of viruses are handled by the automatic systems that build the antivirus updates.
  However, especially interesting or complicated viruses are assigned to the human virus analysts, who work in 12-hour shifts to ensure someone is always on duty to check on new malware.
• -#6- The Moscow headquarters also houses Kaspersky's anti-spam operations, seen here. Pictured above is Maria Namestnikova, senior spam analyst.
• -#7- On this screen a red dot means the country has more than 100 IP addresses spreading spam. According to Kaspersky Lab researchers, the amount of spam being sent by machines in the US has declined considerably since the summer.
• -#8- Inside this isolated iron-clad room, mobile Bluetooth viruses are examined. However, the amount of new Bluetooth malware is on the wane. The most widespread mobile malware nowadays is SMS-based Trojans.

 (Photo credits: Steve Ranger/silicon.com)

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