25 years with or within the Antivirus and Security Industry
Last week (9 December 2014) it was exactly 25 years ago one of my former managers gave me a diskette which appeared to be having the AIDS information trojan. At that time I was one of the first in the world to get a detection for it and who could reverse the situation from a trojanised machine back to healthy one. It changed my life completely. 2 years later I was one of the founders of EICAR. After that my whole life was dedicated to malware and security and I finally became what I always wanted to be: a Security Evangelist, actually a Cybersecurity Expert with deep knowledge of security and excellent skills to communicate technical stuff to non-technical people. If you want to refresh your memory about the AIDS Trojan you can watch my first TV interview (Dutch – VTM) from 9 December 1989 and find out that I changed a little bit.
I love what I’m doing. It’s my life and I’m one of the few which are not doing it only for the money. During those 25 years I’ve met a lot of interesting, brilliant minded and enthusiast people. The AV industry itself is also quite special and I still like to work with or inside this industry even after 30 years IT experience (not counting my university and school years). However some people involved are not always what they pretend to be and just do their job. It’s just a job for them.
It’s not a job for me, it’s much more, It’s my life.
And take it from me, there is a big difference if you’re driven by a mentality or principle to help the general public, companies and organizations in the continuous battle against cybercrime today.
I am ready for the next 25 years .. well that’s maybe a little bit exagerated. ;-)
PS: If you find less blogs from me these days over here just visit the blog page of G DATA or follow my Twitterfeed @EddyWillems or watch the media in your country.
