Kaspersky is announcing the opening of its latest Transparency Center in Seoul, South Korea, reaffirming its commitment to delivering the best security assurance for its products and services. Located in the Kaspersky office, the new facility will provide the company’s stakeholders with services ranging from an overview of Kaspersky’s practices, to a review of product source codes.
Kaspersky served as a pioneer in advancing digital trust by launching the Global Transparency
Initiative (GTI) and becoming the first cybersecurity company to
open its source code for external review. Advocating for a verifiable approach
to the trustworthiness of cybersecurity products, Kaspersky has been providing the company’s stakeholders with the opportunity to conduct
independent reviews of its threat detection rules, software updates, and even the
source code of its solutions at Transparency Centers across the globe.
The Kaspersky Transparency Center in Seoul – the fourth
in the APAC region – will welcome the company’s customers and business partners,
as well as local regulators responsible for cybersecurity. Guests will be able
to choose one of three review options for their visit, depending on the depth
of security assessment needed:
· “Blue piste” offers a general overview of the security development processes of Kaspersky products and services, as well as its data management practices;
· “Red piste” allows for a review of the most critical aspects of source code, assisted by the company’s specialists, and provides a targeted analysis of a particular functionality;
· “Black piste” enables visitors to conduct the most comprehensive and thorough source code review, with the help of Kaspersky’s experts.
The company’s secure software development
documentation, including threat analysis, secure review, and application
security testing processes, as well as the Software Bill of Materials can also
be examined in the course of a Transparency Center visit.
Genie Sugene Gan, Director of Government Affairs and Public
Policy, Asia-Pacific-Japan and META regions for Kaspersky, commented:
“Kaspersky
Transparency Centers are a testament to our commitment to building a more
accountable cybersecurity ecosystem. By opening our new Seoul Center, we
believe that, by sharing our practices with the broader community, we can
foster greater trust in ICT solutions, while also contributing to the
collective effort to combat global cyberthreats.”
In addition to Transparency Centers, since its launch Kaspersky’s
GTI also introduced additional mechanisms to enhance digital trust and promote
greater accountability in the cybersecurity field. These include the relocation
of cyberthreat-related data storage and processing to Zurich,
Switzerland; independent third-party reviews of internal processes
and engineering practices; the launch of a security training
Cyber Capacity Building Program; increasing of bug bounty rewards up to US$100k per the most critical vulnerabilities found in
Kaspersky products, and releasing Transparency Reports, consisting of two
parts and revealing information on requests received from
government and law enforcement agencies, and users for their personal data.
New edition of Kaspersky’s Transparency report
Kaspersky publicly shares its approach to responding to requests from
government and law enforcement agencies in two categories — user data and
technical expertise. The company’s latest “Law Enforcement and Government Requests”
report, covering the first half of 2024, reveals it received a total of
61 requests from nine countries during the reporting period, with all requests
asking for technical expertise. This constitutes a 10.3 percent decrease in the
number of requests compared to the same period in 2023. Along with the data on
law enforcement and government requests, the report on user requests for provision or
removal of stored information has been published.
The measures introduced as part of the GTI constitute
a comprehensive framework that can help external parties assess the security
and trustworthiness of our cybersecurity products. Additionally, these measures
constitute an industry best practice increasing resilience against digital
risks. To learn more about the GTI or request access to the Transparency Center,
please visit the website.
