Pierre Omidyar - Libertarian GG's Libertarian Billionaire Boss

[Cerridwen]

56. Then the Vanity Fair article from 2004 will really make things tough for you.

Especially the part I emphasised.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2004/01/virus-hunters-200401?currentPage=all

The Code Warrior
The nightmare began in August with Blaster, a new kind of virus, which infected computers through their Internet connections, without e-mails or attachments, replicated on its own, and may have played a role in the recent blackout in the U.S. Northeast. A week later, things got worse: the sixth version of SoBig,a virus more sophisticated and cunning each time it appeared, was programming innocentcomputers to an unknown sinister end. In Finland, Michael Shnayerson learns how a ponytailed virus hunter, Mikko Hypponen, raced to defuse the threat—and how lethal these cyber-plagues can be.

<snip>

No surprise, then, that the boom in I.T.—information technology—has fostered a plucky start-up here to guard that information from hackers and virus writers. F-Secure—the name means nothing, but to its founders sounded “cool”—went public in November 1999 during the dot-com wave and saw its stock soar more than a thousand percent, briefly making its young C.E.O., Risto Siilasmaa, the richest man in Finland, to his utter mortification. (Finns are different.) The stock is back where it started, but the company is profitable, in large part because of its crack anti-virus team.

Siilasmaa and the corporate brass enjoy harbor views from the modernist glass boxes where F-Secure has its headquarters, in an industrial area at the western end of Helsinki. Hypponen and his young programmers look out the back from bare, unlit offices onto a dreary street, but none seems to mind: their eyes are glued to their computer screens. Some 600 viruses hit the Internet each month—more than 80,000 have plagued it to date—and Hypponen’s team has to deal with most of them, posting fixes online twice a day to the far-flung corporate clients of F-Secure’s anti-virus program. The pressure, especially when a Level One virus hits, is intense.

“This year, 2003, was the worst in virus history,” says Hypponen, whose good looks, easygoing charm, and perfect command of American jargon make him stand out in your average gathering of European computer wonks. In that terrible year, he says, one month was the worst: “The whole of August was just a nightmare.”

Much more at link.