Written By : Ulukai
August 2004

7. Each Anti-virus software provider has a different name for a virus. Do you think there will eventually be a standard naming convention for everyone?

Norman: The intention is always to get all names synchronized with each other. (E.g. within AVED: www.aved.net). However viruses are spreading so fast that in severe cases detection is more important than synchronizing names before detection. Unfortunately some anti-virus producers have a policy: "whenever a name has been released in a definition or signature file, we do not change the name anymore". Norman on the other hand will change the name if necessary in order to minimize the confusion.

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8. With every company and/or consumer wanting to secure their computers... Where do you see the market moving to? Can we expect to see a change or movement in threats in the future??

Norman: Yes, multi-vector attacks will increase. The industry will move from anti-virus into anti-malware.

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9. Microsoft is increasing security using a firewall, soon they are going to release their own anti-virus product. Is this going to impact your business? If so, how?

Norman: Not really. The corporate users still remember the last failure when MS went into AV-business. They will not change so quickly now. Besides, when you change to a different anti-virus product, you will get quite a lot of extra costs in your infrastructure and cross-over overhead. Most home-users like to keep a product they already know well. Only those home-users who never installed an anti-virus product (unfortunately there are still far too many of them) probably may take the product of MS, especially if in the beginning it will be introduced free of costs. Anyway, in that case our customers will also take advantage of this because every extra security, no matter how small or how bad, may prevent spreading the viruses to them. So attacks from outside to our customers will decrease.

10. Do you run and use your own products on your own servers and workstations?

Norman: Of course we do. Besides that, the Norman scan-engine is used in mailscanners like Sybari's Antigen, GFI MailSecurity and MIMEsweeper.