You're reading: Kaspersky: Cyber terrorism could be next global shock

Yalta – Cyber security in the world is as important as physical and economic security, Eugene Kaspersky, the CEO of one of the world's largest computer security companies, Kaspersky Lab, has said.

“Global cyber attacks and cyber terrorism could be the next global shock. Computer systems are now everywhere, from mines to space stations,” he said at the 9th Yalta Annual Meeting on Friday.

Kaspersky said that the world was already experiencing the problems of cyber terrorism, and the issue concerns not only pornography, cyber crime and viruses. As an example, he cited an attempted attack on nuclear systems in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

“Not everyone understands how deeply this computer world has penetrated into our lives. The physical world is run by computers, and, unfortunately, it’s quite easy to expose these fairly simple systems to attacks. The issue concerns both physical destruction and deliberate production with defects,” he said.

He said there is no country in the world that would have been protected against such attacks. He said that it was technically easy to create such an attack and that the engineers, computer scientists and a small budget were all that was needed for this purpose.

He said Ukrainian and Russian computer scientists and engineers could very likely have been involved in such cyber attacks, and that the customers could be foreign ones.