Set against a medieval fort in the old town of Dubrovnik, Croatia; Eugene Kasperky, CEO of Kaspersky, security expert and self proclaimed collector of computer viruses, looks to the sparkling turquoise waters lapping up behind us against a series of giant stone walls.
"On Sunday there was such a thunderstorm here and now it's much better", Mr Kaspersky chirps, flashing his trademark enigmatic smile as he laughs.
As an ancient fort protecting the town through the ages, Dubrovnik was indeed a traditional solution to an age-old problem: how to protect ourselves against unknown threats.
And while we no longer rely on forts and ancient stone battlements to protect us, new vulnerabilities have arisen as we spend more of our time online, and foes swap cannons for smarter viruses, arrows for sneaky malware and gold coins for the golden details of our bank accounts online.
Eugene Kaspersky paints us a picture of a modern day space race; a global competition between the resources and know-how of the innovative malware writing criminal enterprise, with all the sophistication of a big corporation, and contrasts that with the legitimate corporations themselves.
We asked Eugene about this race to outsmart and outlast the increasing sophistication of malware writers. In reply, he listed three of the biggest security threats currently facing the world right now and how these trends have the potential to impact our digital freedom.
Top 3 threats:
- 1) Cybercrime as an industry:
Kaspersky says: "It used to be just teams of people, most were disconnected. Now it's like an industry. Different groups of cybercriminals do different jobs. Because of that, they are more and more professional and they generate a better quality of malware.
They also have to combine many different technologies in their malware and have gained better and better quality."
- 2) Conficker worm and the rise of cyber terrorism
Kaspersky says: As a result of this high quality of malware and the very good and very tricky ideas they use in their malware, the conficker worm infected more than 10 million computers around the globe and I think this is the most important threat at the moment. That's 10 million machines infected from the same source.
The rest of the sentence I could only explain to the authorities... It's [an] army and the bad guys can do anything they want with the army. But fortunately, fortunately for us, the creators of the conficker are just cyber criminals and nothing more than that.
The bad guys can also use their networks in political ways and I'm afraid that these we will end up calling these attacks in the future as cyber terrorism.
- 3) The growth of data online getting into the wrong hands
Kaspersky says: "Today, there is more and more information online and there is more and more threats to this data. It's getting easier to steal confidential information stored in laptops or mobile phones.
Every month in the UK I'm hearing about another secret service agent losing his notebook with secure data. This type of data can be used more than just by cybercriminals but those who have the potential to be worse than cybercriminals."
We will have more reports from the global antivirus summit over the next few days.