Computer Virus Protection

Salve All,

I simply asume that everybody will agree that the computer revolution has changed the information landscape of the world in the recent years like an avalanche in the Swiss Alps. Starting slowly in the early 70’s the computer changed the way we work, we communicate, we do business, we socialize etc.

But not only the computer revolution has changed the virtual face of the world, during this revolution the revolution itself began to change. Changes happend which were not visible to outsiders like the average mortal computer user. You had to be some sort of insider to see the revolution and it’s industry change over the years.

One of the major changes was away from the inventors, the technical geniuses and the nerds who made the revolution technically happen towards the marketing oriented guys in suits which most of the time have no closer idea what they are selling but they do not care as long as there is a product to sell. With the marketing guys in front anti-virus companies started to lock their technical elite more and more in the backyard and keep them away from the customer.

With these interior changes in the computer industry a lot of changes came across areas like product development and product marketing. To keep it simple and stupid the product development was no longer targeted towards the needs of the customer and the product marketing became some sort of fairytale telling nice little things about the product you will very likely not be able to achieve or use as a normal user. Or differently defined I would say that I never came across a more

One must understand that even this computer revolution is even old enough to write history books about it [1][2]. Even about the history of virus programming a very entertaining book was written by Urnst Kouch [3]. So far the software industry which is batteling computer viruses as their main profession is trying to keep pace with the virus writing underground which seems to be always a bit ahead of the industry.

To be a little bit more precise about that I would like to tell a story which happend in 1999 to me. It was the InfoSec Germany in Frankfurt/Main, the first german information security trading fair and I was attending the stand of Chi-Publishing as the Editor of the newly founded german edition of Information Security Bulletin. As an editor you are the prefered target for marketing guys who wants to see the product or their face in the newspaper (preferably both). One of those marketing events I was invited was the opening of a german subsidary of a large american data security company. The Vice President of that company was giving a speech and afterwards he was introducing the the president of the german subsidary to me. As this man was a german too we switched to the german language and had a chat. During this chat the german leader of the pack confessed to me that he is very clueless about the products he is going to sell in this new company and that he is brandnew to the computer business. He also found computer viruses very attractive and interesting as his son brings always some viruses from the school computer labs and infects his computers. He was seriously considering his son as a teacher for computer basics. In my eyes this chat was the declaration of mental bancruptcy of the leading elite of this company. Didn’t this man realise who he was talking to? Wasn’t I properly introduced to him? Back then I was an editor and he felt very much confident that I would not write down or publish his story of failure. In some ways this man was confessing to me like he was talking to priest. Even if he was new to the computer business he can’t be so naive to have such a chat with a journalist. The running gag of the situation was, that the american Vice President stood beside us chatting with my english colleague from Manchester. If he could have understoond german he might have fired his new german president immediately.

The serious problem of this story is that similar things happened more and more over the past 6 to 7 years to me. Maybe one day I will sit down and write a book full of these stories were the marketing failed to show any kind of competence and professionalism but let me now focus back on this paper.

Best regards,

Howard

[1] Accidental Empires - How the boys of Silicon Valley make their Millions, battle foreign competition, and still can’t get a date; by Robert X. Cringely; Penguin Books; 1992

[2] Fire in the Valley; by Paul Freiberger & Michael Swaine; McGraw Hill; revised second edition 2000, 463 pages

[3] The Virus Creation Labs - A Journey into the Underground; by George C. Smith; American Eagle Publications, 1994, 172 pages