The firm told V3 about its plans to open the office on Monday, saying that its track record of mitigating advanced persistent threats (APTs) will allow AhnLab to become one of the biggests players in Europe's security community.
AhnLab is currently South Korea's largest security company. The firm garnered widespread attention for its involvement in mitigating an attack, believed to stem from North Korea, that targeted several of banks and broadcasters.
AhnLab EMEA manager Simon Edwards told V3 that he planned to carve a share of the European market by offering businesses the unique expertise it has acquired by combating more evolved attacks stemming from the Far East.
"There are two major selling points for AhnLab in the UK. One is the technology. Korea is the most connected country in the world in terms of the number of devices connected to the internet, the proliferation of where the internet is. As a result of that they get attacked a lot," he said. "Even before you look at what's going on north of their borders they're being attacked a lot and as a result of that they are seeing a lot more nasty stuff hitting their centres than people are elsewhere in the world."
The technology will help European businesses counteract the influx of new Russian attacks, influenced by more sophisticated Asian actors, says Edwards.
"The key to it is whether you can detect an attack, and attacks are changing. We do tend to see attacks coming in from Russia more than we would in Korea, but they're similar, for example the move away from basic things like flash-based attacks into non-process executable files, so things like PDFs, Word documents, Excel files, those sorts of things," claimed Edwards.
"So although the threat actors are different, the way they're attacking is very similar and we're still seeing multiple zero-day attacks being moulded into a piece of malware. That's where you need a technology that's capable of seeing things very quickly and understanding what they're doing."
Edwards said AhnLab will also target the enterprise space using a distinctive selling model that won't require the firm to invest vast sums of money up front.
"From a commercial perspective we have a unique offer as well. Where FireEye and most traditional security vendors are going to charge you a lot of money up front for the appliance, we're doing it as a purely subscription-based service," said Edwards. "This means you pay an annual subscription as part of your operating expenditure and you get your clients, you get the service, you get everything. This means there is no capital expenditure required."
The AhnLab manager told V3 the firm expected the model to also appeal to the UK government. "Our core market is enterprise, but I also think we'll prove a hit in government because of the lack of capital expenditure. Obviously government projects at the moment have got horrific problems, not having any budget to spend on new kit and that sort of thing, but they do have operating expenditure, so I think our offer will prove a good thing for government as well," said Edwards.
The office's opening comes during a wider push by the UK government to make the country a leader in the cyber security industry. The move started in 2011, when the government announced its new cyber strategy, pledging to invest £650m to improve the nation's cyber defences. Edwards said the move has made the UK one of the most desirable security markets in Europe and an ideal launch point for AhnLab's expansion.
"The UK is the most developed market within Europe. There are a number of advantages to setting up in the UK, predominantly there's the language, it helps you deal with Americans and English tends to be spoken in most places, but there's also the fact that it is a much more mature market in terms of the partners available, the knowledge that's here the intelligence of the customers," he explained.
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