Justin Sherman
Ahead of his Alaska meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, President Trump threatened “severe consequences” for Russia if it did not stop its violence in Ukraine. More than three years into Russia’s full-scale war, however, one pillar of the Kremlin’s power has evaded its share of consequences: Russia’s cyber industry.
Russia has been home to competitive, innovative cybersecurity companies for decades. Many of these companies provide products and services to the state, ranging from defensive firewalls to specialized trainings to offensive hacking capabilities. (While the energy sector makes up a significant portion of Russia’s gross domestic product, the strategic importance of several other industries—private military companies for projecting power; cyber firms for blocking foreign hacks and facilitating offensive operations—shows that Russia is far more than, as some reductively quip, a “gas station with nukes.”) But despite the waves of sanctions put on Russia since February 2022, these firms’ closeness to the regime, and Russia’s growing technological isolation, some of Russia’s top cyber firms made more money in 2024 than ever before.
Plenty of Russian cyber firms—even sanctioned intelligence contractors—are continuing to build commercial products during war, illicitly access Western software, and land deals in the likes of Latin America, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific. Their profits and adaptation during war are striking. The success of these firms underscores some of the biggest cracks in Western efforts to technologically isolate Russia—and requires American policymakers to rethink their “trusted vendor” approach to global cybersecurity.
Russia’s technology sector might not rival its Chinese peer in economic scale, technological breadth, or hardware manufacturing (where Russia’s capacity is dismal). Yet some of the world’s most competitive, innovative cybersecurity firms came from Russia. Kaspersky was founded in 1997, opened its first international office in the United Kingdom in 1999, and built its antivirus software for pocket computers in 2001. By 2003, it had opened offices in Japan, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and China. While less widely known than Kaspersky, plenty of other cyber companies, such as Positive Technologies and Security Code, cropped up in the ensuing years, offering network security, penetration testing, and other services to a growing market.
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