How to lock the door for hackers: Rustam Kolchin's solutions

Aimira Kuanysh, Astana, editor at The Tech, LinkedIn

As of August 25, 2026, amendments entered into force in the Labor Code and regulatory acts of Kazakhstan , establishing an official obligation for employees to comply with cybersecurity requirements in the workplace. Responsibility has shifted from being solely the domain of the IT department to that of every employee. However, manually monitoring compliance with these rules during remote and hybrid work is extremely difficult; automated solutions are needed to check device status and user actions. Rustam Kolchin, who designed the protection architecture for major corporations such as Rosneft, Sberbank, and VTB, and who serves as Head of the Software Products Development Department at the international IT company Softline, solved this problem by implementing the Zero Trust concept. This is an approach where the system trusts no one inside or outside the network until the device and user have undergone strict verification. The cybersecurity expert explained how businesses can protect data from leaks and give employees the freedom to work hybridly without risking the company.

The Principle of Distrust

Remote work is often protected via VPN, which connects an employee's home computer directly to the office. Over 15 years of experience in protecting IT infrastructure, networks, and applications at leading industry companies—BI.Zone, Gazinformservice, Positive Technologies, and Softline—Rustam Kolchin has helped build robust protection for corporate infrastructure against cyber threats. If a hacker compromises even one remote employee's laptop, they gain access to the entire corporate network and can move freely within it.

To close this gap, Rustam designed and launched a ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Access) system. Instead of granting immediate access to the entire network, the system opens entry only to a single required application. Everything else remains invisible to both the user and hackers. The system checks every second where the person is located, whether their antivirus is up to date, and whether their behavior is suspicious. Any violation results in immediate access revocation.

Kolchin has presented these architectural principles multiple times at international scientific venues. In particular, at the IEEE International Conference on Cyber Security in New York and ISACA Cybersecurity Nexus in Chicago, he delivered reports on building zero-trust infrastructures, and his scientific article on objective principles of ZTNA was published in the American Journal of Computer Science. The author demonstrated that such a transition is necessary everywhere to prevent large-scale breaches of the entire company due to a single error by a remote employee.

Rustam Kolchin, Head of the Software Products Development Department

In modern protection, it is necessary to completely abandon the concept of a "trusted network." Any network is inherently insecure. Every connection and any data request must be continuously verified. Only in this way can a compromised laptop of a remote employee cease to be the cause of stopping the entire business.

After implementing the ZTNA platform, companies can safely transition employees to a hybrid work mode. This eliminates the risk of infecting the corporate network from the outside.

Email Under Fire

Email remains the primary tool for remote work and simultaneously the main attack channel, with up to 90% of hacks starting with emails. Standard email filters look for threats based on known "blacklists." However, modern fraudsters use neural networks, spoof addresses, and send links to lookalike sites, easily bypassing standard protection.

In response, Rustam Kolchin created the Mail Security Guardian platform—a smart buffer that intercepts all incoming emails before they reach the company's mail server and the employee's inbox. The system breaks down the email into details: it checks the sender's technical headers, finds anomalies in the code, employs machine learning algorithms to detect deception, and runs suspicious files in an isolated digital environment for analysis.

Rustam Kolchin, Head of the Software Products Development Department

We applied artificial intelligence to analyze the behavior and reputation of an email in a fraction of a second even during the delivery stage. This allowed us to achieve a recognition accuracy of dangerous emails at 99.3%.

His analysis showed that the implementation of the platform yielded record-breaking figures: spam volume decreased by 89.4%, phishing by 92.9%, and virus-laden emails by 97.6%. It is successfully used by more than 50 companies in Kazakhstan, Russia, and Belarus.

Kolchin published the results of this development and mathematical filtering models in the peer-reviewed journal International Journal of Advanced Artificial Intelligence Research. He also won the "Developer of the Year" nomination at the Digital Leaders 2026 competition with this project.

Shadow Access

When people work from various locations, it is difficult for the IT department to perform large-scale control. Sometimes employees install third-party programs themselves, while remote administrators and contractors are granted overly broad access rights. Standard one-time penetration tests become outdated the very next day, as the company's digital infrastructure changes continuously.

To solve the problem of "blind spots," Rustam combined two technological solutions: a continuous pentesting system and a privileged access management platform. The first continuously scans all external addresses, domains, and applications of the company and immediately alerts to vulnerabilities; the second controls system administrators and contractors. Access to the "core" of the IT system is granted strictly for the duration of the task, and all actions are recorded on video.

Rustam Kolchin, Head of the Software Products Development Department

You can only manage what you see. Continuous monitoring provides visibility of the external perimeter 24/7, and systems like PAMP ensure that even a remote administrator cannot accidentally or intentionally damage critical infrastructure.

Kolchin outlined the methodology for transitioning from one-time checks to continuous attack surface monitoring in his scientific monograph and an article for the International Research Journal of Advanced Engineering and Technology, and also presented it at major industry forums such as CIPR and Go Digital in Astana.

The project was implemented to protect the infrastructure of PJSC Rosneft and other large companies, which can now fully control the actions of any remote specialists.

The engineering solutions created by Rustam Kolchin enable any business, regardless of its location, to build a reliable, transparent, and proactive protection system ready for modern global cyber threats.