Natalya Kasperskaya has successfully grown her software development company, InfoWatch Group, while also acting as a major lobbyist for the Russian IT sector. However, when it comes to the government’s plans to control the internet in the country, she does not seem to have a large degree of influence and can only translate growing public unhappiness with these measures.

Kasperskaya first came to the limelight back in the 1990s when she co-founded major anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab with her then-husband Yevgeny Kaspersky.

Following their divorce, Kasperskaya obtained control of a small company within the Kaspersky Lab structure, which specialised in developing DLP systems - or leak prevention - and was considered a non-core business for Kaspersky Lab.

Over the last 20 years, that business has grown into InfoWatch Group, which dominates the data leak prevention segment in Russia, with over 600 employees and over 3,000 customers, many of which are Russian government agencies and public-sector companies.

In 2024, the most recent data available, InfoWatch Group reported significant growth: revenue rose by more than 50% to RUB3.9bn ($53mn), year-on-year, while its net profit doubled from the previous year.

Kasperskaya is also one of the founders and chair of the board of Domestic Software, an association of Russian software product developers, which includes over 300 Russian IT companies.

Loyal to the Kremlin

Kasperskaya has repeatedly stressed that she shares the political line of the Russian government. She has been regularly attending meetings in the Kremlin which are open only to a selected group of Russian entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs are believe to be closest to the highest echelon of Russian power.

"I have always sincerely considered myself pro-government and a patriot," Kasperskaya recently wrote on her Telegram channel.

Incidentally, her second husband Igor Ashmanov, also an IT entrepreneur, whom she married in the early 2000s, is known for an even more radical and conservative rhetoric.

On his subscription-only blog, he called for bombing Ukrainian government buildings, blowing up German factories that are supplying weapons to Ukraine and attacking Western data centres, as the internet is a major force in a conflict between Russia and the West, Maria Kolomichenko, a reporter for The Bell, recently said on a Meduza podcast.

Kasperskaya and Ashmanov have also supported the idea of a "sovereign Internet" in Russia, which would be separated from the global web, offering access only to selected websites. The Russian government has been mulling this idea for a few years, and the most recent restrictions on the internet use in the country are believed to be part of that strategy.

Incidentally, although Kasperskaya has long had no relation to Kaspersky Lab, she has sometimes been mistakenly associated with controversies around her ex-husband's company, such as restrictions on operations in some Western countries over alleged FSB ties.

Standing up for the Russian IT industry

Kasperskaya's loyalty to the Russian government and her good contacts in the highest echelons of power must have helped her to successfully lobby for the interests of the domestic IT sector.

In the mid-2010s, at a meeting of entrepreneurs with Russia's President Vladimir Putin, Kasperskaya pointed out to him that, from the next year, the government was supposed to withdraw some of the privileges previously granted to the IT sector, Kolomychenko said on the Meduza podcast.

A few days later, the decision about withdrawing privileges for the IT industry was cancelled, event though some government agencies, including the ministry of finance, were vehemently against it.

More recently, Kasperskaya was able to successfully lobby the Russian government to persuade it not to increase the value added tax (VAT) for Russian IT firms.

When Kasperskaya's lobbying powers hit the wall

However, when it comes to major decisions by the Russian government set to have an impact on the country's IT industry, Kasperskaya's powers seem to be limited.

In early April, when many individual users and businesses in Russia were hit by internet blackouts, Kasperskaya entered into a public dispute with the communications watchdog Roskomnadzor, which apparently was behind the blackouts.

She made a few harsh statements, claiming that the agency had “in its zeal to combat circumvention of blocks, brought half of the Russian internet services to a standstill”.

“No, this is not an enemy raid, nor an attack by external actors or malicious foreign hackers," she said on her Telegram account. "It is our very own Roskomnadzor that has finally decided to take a serious approach to combating tunnelling and traffic protection services, also known as VPNs.”

However, she soon walked back her statements and apologised to Roskomnadzor for her “hasty conclusions”. She explained that she had spoken to the head of Roskomnadzor, Andrei Lipov, and he had explained that the disruption was linked to the operation of the country's largest, state-run lender Sberbank rather than any actions from Roskomnadzor.

In early May, The Bell reported on an alleged meeting between Kasperskaya and officers from the FSB’s division responsible for internet blocking in Russia.

According to a source in the Russian IT industry quoted by The Bell, Kasperskaya complained to the FSB that her company, InfoWatch Group, has been hit by the recent internet outages, criticising the idea of a ban on VPNs as her company's employees have to use VPNs for various software developing tasks.

However, Kasperskaya denied a meeting with the FSB. On May 10, she published a post on her Telegram channel, explicitly saying: “I did not meet with the FSB”. According to Kasperskaya, she had discussed the possibility of such a meeting “within a small circle of colleagues, in a hypothetical context." "But no one from the esteemed agency has contacted me,” she concluded.

A hint at "digital resistance"?

So far, Kasperskaya's criticism of Russian government agencies has been very limited and cautious. But she recently published a post on her Telegram account that could be viewed as a hint at Russians' growing unhappiness with the recent restrictions on Internet access in Russia and plans to step up those measures.

In her post, she refers to "digital resistance", a possible grassroots movement of people who are unhappy with recent restrictions in the digital sphere.

"These conversations aren’t a political movement," she wrote. "They’re simply people’s habit of using certain mobile services that they’d like to keep, yet someone has suddenly decided to take them away without any grounds or explanation."

"Ill-considered digital pressure provokes natural digital resistance - exactly in accordance with the laws of physics," she went on to say. "Fortunately, the Russian digital resistance has no leaders as yet - and I certainly am not one of them. But God forbid they should appear. It will be no small matter for anyone."

This comes as another - albeit rather moderate - expression of discontent with the current state of affairs in Russia from people generally loyal to the country’s current political regime.