The company’s most recent move to show it’s independent from the Russian government has been to announce a new data center in Switzerland that will store information from customers in US, Europe, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Australia.Īt the same time, Kaspersky Lab continues to have a good reputation in the industry. Meanwhile, several news stories alleged that the company’s software helped Russian intelligence services steal highly classified documents from a US National Security Agency contractor. Best Buy stopped sales of the software, some of Kaspersky Lab’s financial customers dropped it, and more recently, Twitter banned the company from advertising on its platform. The government bans have also spilled over to the private sector.

The British and Dutch governments has since followed suit. First, on the heels of the congressional inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 American presidential elections, the US government proposed and eventually passed a federal ban and purge on the use of Kaspersky Lab software across all government agencies. Kaspersky Lab has been mired in an ongoing crisis. It’s an unintentionally appropriate way for Kaspersky Lab to open its biggest event, since many attendees and the cyber security world at large have the same question for the company.