Monday, December 18, 2006

A brief hello

Since this is the first post, I thought I'd take a couple of sentences to talk about TCSL, and what we're about. I'm a long term anti virus guy, having started one of the first anti virus companies in Australia in 1987. I've stayed active in the industry at a technical level, and in 2005, I formedThompson Cyber Security Labs with a view towards making the industry stronger by helping people test their antivirus and antispyware products, mostly through private testing.You see, testing malicious code detection and remediation is quite tricky to do properly. Firstly, you've got to know how malicious code works, and what it does to a system, otherwise you can't tell if the antivirus/ antispy was able to stop it and/ or remove it properly. You can't rely on the logs of the av/ as program either, because that might be flat out wrong. There are many cases where av/as programs _say_ they've done something, and they simply haven't.So, that's where we come in. We'll monitor antivirus and antispy programs' ability to handle all sorts of malicious code.We'll start with rootkits...Stay tuned,Roger