Ferrari uses Kaspersky products in its corporate operation, Eugene Kaspersky says, and the company is pitching software to the Ferrari engineers to guard against potential malware in embedded control gear.

Ferrari's business "is not just about cars," Kaspersky says "There are more and more devices - cars, machines, planes - that have computers managing all their systems. The security problems are getting more and more important because a proportion of those systems are not secure enough. There are reports about security issues in a non-computer environment which are serious and are caused by malware."

Some experts suggest widespread power failures on the East Coast of the US in 2003 were an indirect consequence of computer malware, Kaspersky says. The main report on the incident saw other causes, "but an alternative report says the blackout was caused by computer malfunction in the power grid management centre. They ran Unix machines but those stopped operations because they were affected by heavy data traffic generated by Microsoft Windows systems that had been infected by the Blaster worm.

Kaspersky also refers to an air crash in Spain in 2008 which left more than 150 dead.

"Last August [experts] said the plane crashed because of technical problems. But the problems were not found by on-ground inspection because the systems [diagnosing] the plane's condition were connected to infected computers, so the engineers didn't have a report about the technical problems. The malware wasn't a direct cause of the catastrophe; but it wouldn't have happened without it."