Paper could make a comeback as a medium for storing critical information as organizations modify their behaviour in the face of mounting online threats, says the founder of Moscow-based computer security company Kaspersky Lab.

Eugene Kaspersky said governments and corporations had already begun to elevate security concerns but revelations of U.S. spying activity contained in documents leaked over the summer by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden added a new sense of urgency.

“Big enterprises were even talking about back-to-paper scenarios because of espionage attacks,” Kaspersky said Wednesday after the company released is 2014 cyber threat forecast.

“Enterprises, governments — they are really serious about extra levels of security, extra regulation, disconnecting their services from the Internet, maybe even getting some processes back to paper,” Kaspersky said.

“It’s a very visible step backward.”

Eight tech companies including Apple, Google and Microsoft on Monday called on President Obama to spur government reform of NSA surveillance practices after documents leaked by Snowden alleged the agency accessed private IT networks and collected personal information.

Kaspersky said countries are being compelled to develop their own closed Internet networks, a fragmentation that will leave Web companies with fewer resources and less investment.

As such, the Internet as a seamless worldwide network may cease to be, giving way to national webs with limited access to foreign Internet resources, added Kaspersky security expert Alexander Gostev.

So far, he said only China has a closed network of domestic servers but several countries including Russia have either passed or are preparing laws restricting the use of offshore servers.

In its forecast Kaspersky Lab, Russia’s biggest maker of anti virus software, predicted increasing threats to mobile devices and to data stored in virtual cloud servers, a surge in encryption services and more attacks on exchanges of the Bitcoin digital currency.

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