ESET CEO Richard Marko to head global R&D and oversee rollout of next generation security solutions

ESET, the leader in proactive threat protection, recently announced the appointment of Richard Marko as the new CEO. The new management has already outlined strategies for worldwide market development of the company and its subsidiaries.
“One of our primary goals will be to open even more research centers to reaffirm our position as one of the technological leaders in the industry,” said ESET’s CEO Richard Marko. These centers will carry out leading-edge analysis on the latest trends in IT security and provide ESET product users and the general public with information on new technologies and ways to protect themselves against all cyber-threats. Already at the close of 2010, ESET has established a Cyber Threat Analysis Center (CTAC) in San Diego, California. Building on the success of ESET’s existing global research resources, CTAC is committed to working to further protect ESET’s corporate clients and home users alike by collaborating with universities, law enforcement authorities, internet service providers and other agencies that actively combat cybercrime.

Overseeing the extensive network of research teams will be the newly appointed Chief Research Officer Juraj Malcho. Malcho has been with ESET since 2004 and worked his way up to become the head of the Virus Lab, the nerve center for threat analysis.
Additionally, ESET will continue to focus on advancing the portfolio of consumer and business endpoint security products for all supported platforms: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The next generation of ESET’s flagship security solutions, ESET Smart Security for Windows will be released for public testing as beta version in the coming weeks, with the final release slated at later point in 2011. Overseeing the main technology arm of ESET will be the new Chief Technology Officer Pavel Luka along with the Chief Software Architect Tomáš Kaláb. As accomplished developers, Luka and Kaláb, have already participated in the development of second-, third- and fourth generations of ESET security solutions.

ESET CEO Richard Marko outlined his vision for the company: “ESET will focus on enriching its product portfolio for new mobile platforms and we are closely following the market opportunities for tablets.”. Also, a security product for the Android mobile platform is being developed with top priority. Simultaneously, ESET is keeping close watch on the evolution of the iOS mobile platform and possibilities to develop solutions for this platform.

The threat landscape is changing rapidly subjecting corporate to a wide range of attacks. Wikileaks and hackers operation Aurora confirm that data breaches are increasingly becoming part of everyday life for businesses. This is why data loss prevention has the attention of ESET’s technology developers. “ESET is actively working on new DLP solutions to protect its business clients,” confirmed Marko.
Richard Marko is a graduate of Information Systems Department, Slovak Technical University in Košice (1996). He began his career with ESET during his college studies and is one of the co-authors of the ESET NOD32 Antivirus scanning engine. Initially, he held the post of Chief Software Architect of the scanning core and in 2008 became Chief Technology Officer. His works on antivirus have been published extensively at home and abroad. He has also given numerous lectures on heuristic algorithms at conferences like Virus Bulletin and AVAR.