I’m very excited about today’s guest. Very few industry experts know him by name, even though he’s the guy who first discovered the notorious Stuxnet worm in 2010. His name is Sergey Ulasen.
First, a few background words about Sergey. I’m happy to say that he joined the company in August 2011, immediately starting to contribute to the ever growing expertise of our malware analysis team, which now consists of more than 100 experts around the world. He’s a very professional and high spirited man, possessing the expert knowledge and experience for tackling even the most sophisticated threats.
Sergey graduated in 2006 from the Belorussian State Technical University with a B.Sc. in software development. He began his professional career with local anti-virus vendor VirusBlokAda as a programmer. Later Sergey joined the team that engineered the company’s anti-virus engine, and in 2008 he became the team leader. He was also involved in developing anti-rootkit and system rescue technologies, and helped with solving the most sophisticated malware incidents.
Then he joined KL. Me very happy.
Sergey, let’s go back to the moment when your team first discovered the Stuxnet sample. How did it all come about?
It was all quite simple, actually – far from how such things might be portrayed in the movies, I can tell you!
At the time I was working for a relatively small security company, and had quite a lot of different responsibilities. I was involved in software development, threat analysis, technical consulting, and dealing with incidents involving the most sophisticated malware as reported by our customers.
It all started when the technical support guys informed me about a rather unusual case: a customer in Iran reported arbitrary
BSODs and computer reboots. They forwarded me the help-request together with info about their preliminary scanning reports.
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