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Eugene Kaspersky: China has great potential in cybersecurity

(China Daily) Updated : 2018-11-09

Q1: How do you see the role of the World Internet Conference? How does your company benefit from the annual meeting?

Q2: Which aspects of the conference inspired you most and why? What are your key takeaways from this year's conference?

Q3: How do you view the future of China's internet sector? How will your company better tap into the booming industry and its increasing integration with artificial intelligence?

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Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of Kaspersky Lab. [Photo/China Daily]

A1 It (the World Internet Conference) is a very important and leading event. I can also see that China is still looking for new opportunities to make it better. I'm very glad to attend such a big event and stay in Wuzhen, such a pretty place.

I'm also very glad to see that this year's event has discussions about cybersecurity for the industrial sector. It is a very promising field and China has great potential in its development.

We really look forward to more cooperation with Chinese enterprises. Right now we are looking for partners in the industrial cybersecurity sector.

Our company has certainly benefited from the conference. We presented our techniques and products not only to many companies, which projected great business opportunities, but also to officials attending the event.

A2 Of course I am mostly inspired by discussions about industrial internet adaptations, since industrial cybersecurity has been an important focus of our businesses. Not a lot of people realize that cybersecurity for industries is a growing sector - a new but important one. What we are doing now is building the infrastructure and developing an ecosystem in this sector.

I gave a speech on Thursday about training engineers. The panel discussion made me more aware that one of the largest challenges right now is a lack of professionals and skilled engineers to build such an infrastructure and ecosystem.

Cybersecurity in industry is very complicated because the latter has various different systems. Even for two similar power plants, technologies used to guarantee their cybersecurity can be very different for many reasons, for example the power plants might have been built in different times.

Right now we don't see many trained engineers in industrial cybersecurity. As a result, the most critical thing for the sector's development for now is education. The sector needs more people and more trained professionals adapted to industrial needs. We are open to more cooperation and communication on the topic.

A3 China invests so much into cyberspace, and there's no doubt China is and will be one of the leaders of the internet globally, not only because of its big population, but because of its leading companies in the industry, such as Huawei, which have grown into global brands.

We have a lot of opportunities, and it's not only because of traditional cybersecurity, a sector which we are in and do very well, but once again, it's also about infrastructure security.