Natalya Kaspersky

For other people named Kasperski, see Kasperski (disambiguation).

Natalya Kaspersky
Natalya Kasperskaya standing outside
Born	Natalya Ivanovna Kasperskaya (1966-02-05) February 5, 1966 Moscow, Russia, USSR
Nationality	Russian
Occupation	Business executive
Years active	1984 - present
Known for	Former Chairwoman of Kaspersky Lab

Natalya Ivanovna Kasperskaya (Russian: Наталья Ивановна Касперская), (born 5 February 1966, Moscow, Russia), is the CEO of InfoWatch and the former Chairwoman of Russian antivirus security software company Kaspersky Lab. Until 2007 she was CEO of Kaspersky Lab. As of October 2006, she and her ex-husband Eugene Kaspersky, a cryptologist and Kaspersky Lab CEO, owned about 80 percent of the company together.

Biography

Kasperskaya graduated from the Moscow Institute of Electronic Machine Building (MIEM) in 1989 with a master's degree in applied mathematics. She received her bachelor's degree in business from the UK's Open University.

In 1994 Kasperskaya started working at KAMI Information Technologies Center where she was involved in managing an antivirus project, AVP, which in 1997 was turned into Kaspersky Lab company. Kasperskaya co-founded the company and became the first CEO.

In 2003 being Kaspersky lab CEO, Natalya initiated the set-up of a daughter company InfoWatch, focused on developing solutions to protect corporate confidential data from leakage.

In 2007 Kasperskaya stepped back from CEO position in Kaspersky Lab and took over a daughter company, InfoWatch, taking the CEO position. With a newly formed Directors’ board she started regional expansion and company’s product portfolio enhancement.

Natalya joined Nanosemantics in 2007.

In 2011, Natalya Kasperskaya acquired a German company Cynapspro GmbH developing endpoint data protection solutions for SMB companies. Thus InfoWatch turned into a Group of companies.

Earlier the same year InfoWatch acquired a Canadian company Appercut Security, an innovate technology developer, focused on business application source code analysis, finding malicious backdoors and protecting against insider programmers.

In October 2012 Natalya Kasperskaya has taken over 16.8 percent of German antivirus security company G Data Software AG shares and was elected to the supervisory board.

She participates regularly in business development seminars and conferences worldwide. In 2010 she was co-chair of the first Horasis Global Russia Business Meeting in Ljubljana.

Kasperskaya divorced her first husband Eugene Kaspersky in 1998, and later remarried. She has five children.

Awards

Natalya Kasperskaya holds multiple awards in Russian and International Business and IT:

Bronze medalist of “Top-100 most influential Russian women in business” rating.

“Russian Business Leader of the Year 2012” award honoring her remarkable contribution to the progress of the Russian IT community, according to Horasis, the Global visions community.

Leader of “Top-1000 highest Russian managers of 2013” in IT according to Kommersant leading Russian business daily and Association of Russian managers.

Best Technology Business Entrepreneur, Women in Technology MEA 2014 awards, Dubai.

Opinion on internet restrictions

In July, 2012, Natalia Kasperskaya publicly weighed-in on legislation pending in Russia's lower parliament that would create an "Internet Blacklist" of banned sites similar to the Great Firewall of China. Despite unanimous condemnation from human rights groups, internet freedom advocates, and Wikipedia, Natalia Kaspersky went on record supporting this law, claiming that "some new restrictions" were necessary in order to protect children and that concerns about censorship were exaggerated.