ESET Promotes Richard Marko to CEO
ESET has appointed Richard Marko as 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,” Marko said.
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 from cyberthreats. ESET has already established a Cyber Threat Analysis Center in San Diego, Calif. Building on the success of ESET’s existing global research resources, the center 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 product, ESET Smart Security for Windows, will be released for public testing as a beta version in the coming weeks, with the final release coming later in 2011. Overseeing the main technology arm of ESET will be the new chief technology officer, Pavel Luka, along with Chief Software Architect Tomáš Kaláb. As accomplished developers, Luka and Kaláb have already helped develop second-, third- and fourth generations of ESET security solutions.
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.
The threat landscape is changing, rapidly subjecting corporations to a wide range of attacks. Wikileaks and operation Aurora confirm that data breaches are increasingly becoming part of everyday life for businesses. This is why data loss prevention (DLP) has the attention of ESET’s technology developers. “ESET is actively working on new DLP solutions to protect its business clients,” confirmed Marko.
Marko graduated from the information systems department of Slovak Technical University in Slovakia. 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, but in 2008 he became chief technology officer. His works on antivirus have been published in Slovakia and abroad.