Wow right, are right all aboard the global Bob Show. This is your field commander global Bob, and I am broadcasting from the very high tech, very beautiful Richard hook broadcast facility. This is such a wonderful facility here. It's very high tech. And what's really neat about the broadcast facility is that we don't require any power to be able to broadcast. As many of y'all know, I am an avid amateur radio operator. And so very easily, we can broadcast worldwide from here using our amateur radio. And as far as the power is concerned, we have a nice about 4600 watts of solar that we can utilize to power the equipment. And if the internet is not up and going by my provider, I have a backup circuit couple of backup circuits here, one of which is Starlink, which is a very amazing product by the illustrious Elon Musk. And so we can really, you know, get this show out, no matter what I feel like we can. Now some of y'all may have noticed that last week, the show did not come out on Spotify, or out on Apple podcast. The reason for the delay in the show was not because of the situation inside the broadcast facility. But it was the situation with the broad cast store. That is me Globalbob It appears that I had my luck run out. And I come down with the China virus or as it is scientifically known COVID Nine teen and it was just bad timing. I usually record this show during the weekend. So that's usually on Saturday or Sunday. And at the latest record is on Monday. But I was at a family event. Everything was going well. This was on Saturday, and there was a lot of festivities and jubilation. But I kind of felt like I was getting overheated because I was outside cruising on my also wonderful one will and my little brother was on the one wheel for the first time. So we'll probably talk a little bit about that because it does have a technology and political subject matter that we can talk about. And I kind of felt like I got overheated. So I came inside, sat down did not fill well. And a couple of my family members said hey, I think you get Coronavirus. Well, lo and behold, I got home Saturday evening. And my wife who is my chief medical officer, she gave me one of the COVID-19 test the antigen test as it is referred to and I come back positive for COVID 19 which I had a good run. This was the first time I had come down with COVID 19. And so it was all new for me but by the time it hit me was on Sunday and into Monday and therefore during my prime recording. I did not get a chance to record the show. I will say I am very honored and very thankful for all my fans and listeners because instantly it was on Tuesday evening I started getting phone calls and text messages from those that must have not got word that I was down with the China virus. And they were pretty concerned about me because they noticed that Spotify and Apple Music and whatever directories they use They did not get their alert about the Globalbob show. And so I got some phone calls, which I didn't answer, I just texted back and some Facebook messages and stuff. So really glad that you all look forward to the Globalbob show. So as always, thank you, everybody who tunes in every week, I think everybody that subscribes to the show, and especially those that ask somebody to subscribe. So technically, the Globalbob show could have happened, probably would have sounded like a robot or had a frog in my throat. And so it was a physical problem that kept the show from coming out. So with that said, I promise, the goal is to put out one show per week. And after a year, hopefully we have 52 shows out. So my promise to the listeners, we will come up with a makeup show. So if you would like to subscribe to the show, you can do it through any of the major directories, you can get the show directly from the site, the global Bob Show, you can reach me on Twitter at Globalbob show. And you can also look at the Facebook page by searching Globalbob show. All right, well, that brings us to the topic of today. So I was I was laying in bed thinking about what show I wanted to put on and been infected with the China virus. I decided that I wanted to address a question I get all the time. And that is do antivirus companies. Now this is computer antivirus. But you know, probably some people think other antiviral companies do the same thing. But the show is do antivirus companies make viruses. And we will unpack the subject, and explore all the different areas of the subject matter and give you a little bit of history of viruses and antivirus companies. So stay tuned as we address this. So before we dive in too deep here, we need to put some definitions around a few terms. Now most of you have heard of trojans, viruses, and worms. And together they're called malware. But there are differences between the various groups here. So a virus think of a virus as something that needs a host, just like a virus in your body, just like Coronavirus in my body. It needed a host. And so a virus infects other programs. So if you get your computer infected with a virus, a lot of times it injects itself inside of a program that it knows the user will run. So that's a virus. A worm is kind of like a virus. And these are probably the two that get confused most often. And a worm is something that self propagates. See a virus requires the user to propagate it, whether it's through a thumb drive, or a piece of media, you know, that's how a virus propagates but a worm it has all the mechanisms to propagate itself. So commonly, worms when they're downloaded onto a computer at your company, then the the worm will start looking for other computers or devices on the network, and then it will replicate to them. Also worms will try to replicate itself through your email program. So that's the difference between a virus and a worm. Now a Trojan just like in the Greek mythology, the Trojan horse. A Trojan is a piece of malware that takes and disguises itself to carry a payload. Now all of these can kind of work interchangeably. And so to they during this show, when we use the word, virus, just know that we're kind of talking about the malware group. So there you go. Now you know the difference between a virus and a worm when did the first virus come out? Well, this is a little bit murky, because during the time when computers were stopped Learning to become actually known was back in the late 60s and early 70s. And these computers were very, very large systems. They were nothing like what we have today, one particular computer, it's called ENIAC, and ENIAC was about the size of a few city blocks. So you got to think in those terms, when the first virus came out, and the first virus, that pretty much everybody in industry says was the first virus was called the creeper virus or creeper program. And it came out in 1971. And it was by a guy named Bob Thomas. And creeper was more of kind of a proof of concept to see if he could make something that could self replicate. So in this case, this is kind of like a worm, right, we talked about worms, their main job is to replicate themselves. But in this particular one, it didn't do anything malicious, it just went from computer to computer, and it would display a message called I'm the creeper Catch Me If You Can. So no malicious intent, it was just something that was more of a proof of concept, but that was in 1971. So there was no internet at the time, if there was persistent storage, or what would later become the hard drive, it was only a few bytes or so. So that was the first one. So Bob Thomas 1971, with his creeper virus. So the first one that came out, that actually had malicious intent would be a few years later. And that virus was called the rabbit virus. And that was in 1974. And what the rabbit virus did was, it would get on to a computer, and then it would simply just replicate itself until it crashed the system. And I'm not sure who the actual author was behind that. But it was just the one that goes down in history as one of the first that had the actual malicious intent. So that's on the viruses. Now, the first Trojan, remember, the Trojan is something that carries a payload. And that would go down in history by guy named John Walker, Johnnie Walker. So the name of the Trojan that he created in 1974, was called animal. Now back in the 70s, there was a game that came out. And it was basically to show the degrees of separation amongst animals. And so you could take and it would ask you a series of questions about animals. And you would flip through the pages of the book, and it would say something like, has long ears, and you would flip to page 36. And it says, has fur, and you would flip to page 18. And so there was something that was written down. So this guy decided John Walker, that he would create a Trojan called animal that would ask you those same questions on the computer screen, and it would tell you what animal you're thinking of. And so it could do this in 20 questions. But what he also did was have this as a Trojan that installed a piece of software called pervade. And all purveyed would do was copy the animal program into every directory on the system. So, you know, a lot of people don't even realize about directories on systems anymore, because it's been so abstracted. But for those of us that get into computers early now, I mean, this animal was back in 1975, which is about four years before I was even born. But we understood with Windows 3.31, and with Macintosh that you had these directories and so if you had 1000 directories on your computer, then Johnnie Walker there John Walker's Trojan would copy animal to each and every directory. So that was the basic theme in the 70s it It was these worms and viruses and Trojans, they were more like proof of concept code, they weren't not necessarily malicious. And if they were, they were kinda kind of benign. Now, fast forward to 1986. Now I was in first grade in 1986. And that's when I kind of feel like viruses started to mature. And they started having more of a purpose than just to prove that they can replicate themselves. And so the first stealth bootloader type virus now getting, you know, into the more sophisticated viruses that we know of today was in 1986. And there was two brothers beset and Fogra. I'm sure I messed up that last name there, but two brothers Bissette and fro GWA. And they were both young folks. Bissette was 17. And his brother progra was 24. And they developed this heart monitoring software. Now, these were two Pakistani brothers. And they had a heart monitoring software. And they noticed that on some forums and other areas that their virus was being pirated. And so these illegal copies of their program were being made, which means that they were not being compensated for their program. So what they did was was made a virus that would display a number to call to get inoculated. And I think that's kind of cool, because, you know, going up into these times, it was a malicious program. So how did we get to call it a virus? How do we get to call it these different definitions? Where did those definitions come from? Well, I like to think that probably the virus was called a virus because the brothers had a number that said, call this number to get inoculated. And that was really cool. But the brothers would later go on, and even today, they're still active. Now they're not virus riders. But they own a ISP, internet service provider in Pakistan. And they actually own the largest ISP in Pakistan. And that is called Brain net. And so the name of their virus was the brain virus. Well, here's when things start to shift. So now we have our first bootloader virus. And so the people at Big Blue, also known as IBM, they write the first anti virus. And at that time, IBM was the leader in all things, computers, and they had big research facilities and big staff. And really, IBM was a huge player all the way through the 80s 90s, early 2000s. But now, in today's times, probably a lot of kids have never even heard of an IBM computer. But anything that was with computers was almost always coming out of IBM, which this virus was released in 1986. It will be 1987. When the first antivirus companies are formed now, like I said, IBM started writing an anti virus software, but the first antivirus company would be in 1987. And actually a whole host of companies would start jumping on to this virus bandwagon. But the first company was McAfee and if you guys are familiar with John McAfee in his later life, you know that he was quite the eccentric person. So in 1987, we got McAfee. Also in 1987, a company out of Germany called G data. They got to the antivirus software and another one called EA set. Also in 1987, which is kind of cool because these companies are still around in various capacities. And then in the next year, here comes some more online company called a Vera and then another company called a vast which was out of the Czech Republic. And then we got a non lab which was from South Korea. In 1988. Also came Dr. Solomon's anti virus out of the UK Sophos out of England Kaspersky out of Russia, F product from Iceland 1989 also brought us Symantec. No notice I said Symantec, and not Norton, I know that people use the two interchangeably. But they were two different companies, and Symantec came first 1990 brought us Panda 9090 also brought us Trend Micro. And then we also had Norton in 1991. And that kind of rounds out your top 15 companies. And just looking at this list, I had the distinct honor of working very much in the trenches with Symantec, Norton, and also Albarran. And it's just really neat to know that all of a sudden, all of these companies started being formed to combat the rise of viruses. So before the companies, when they would form the software companies, they were usually coming together to make a killer application, like Microsoft Word, or IBM's, os two warp kind of date myself by talking about IBM OS two warp, but I did have that installed one time. But these companies were being formed strictly to protect computers from viruses. And if you see the rise of this kind of the what I feel like is, is that as computers started to become officially connected, because in the 80s, we had ARPANET, which came out of DARPA. And not everybody was connected to the internet like they are today. So it seems like as the connectivity of home computers and computers in general started to become formalized through internet service providers, well, there was a rise in viruses. And therefore these companies were kind of trying to play catch up. So cruising right along, I'll give you some stats, and why these companies don't need to write their own viruses. Now, I've mentioned that I've worked with Norton, Vera, and Symantec. And whenever I was involved with Norton slash Symantec, they were, you know, one company, and of course, now they've been split back out again. But the thing is, is that there's so many anti viruses being written by cyber criminals, by nation states from all around the world, that there's just so much out there that the antivirus companies do not need to write viruses themselves. Moreover, any virus that is written, it's a quasi gray area, whether it causes destruction or steals data or not, of course, if it does cause destruction and steal data, then it is illegal. So these companies are not going to be engaged in illegal activity to promote their via anti virus software. They don't need it. And I'll tell you the reason why. Because here's some stats that according to safety detective.com That shows that the companies already have a very hungry market that wants to stay safe. Do you believe that 70% of Americans worry about their personal data being stolen? That's kind of a high number. But did you know that the same Americans that were polled only 24% of them worry about terrorism. So you can see that very quickly. 70% of the people are more worried about their personal data and data being stolen than what they are terrorism. Now, we can all rest assured that the de facto standard for word processing and presentations and all of that is Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Office is still the primary attack point for malware. Remember, malware is a collection of Trojans viruses is kind of an umbrella term, but Microsoft Office is the one that is most attacked and really 38% of malware is attacking or using Microsoft Word to propagate. Now, why do these criminals, right, all of these viruses and Trojans and all of that because It is simply a big business. It's been speculated that North Korea is getting money from the world market via cryptocurrency via ransomware. And whenever I say it's big business, do you know that companies will pay almost $11.5 billion and ransomware? We hear about ransomware all the time. And people think, well, who the heck pays that? Well, they do. Like I said, it's $11.5 billion industry. And the total cost of cybercrime is in the range of $2 trillion. Now, by 2025, they speculate that it will be a $6 trillion price tag. And that's what it cost to fight cybercrime and fight all these viruses off. So very big business on both sides, you have the criminals that are creating these different variants of malware, then you have the antivirus companies that are trying to stop this from propagating. Now something that we do see is is that once crypto became mainstream, like Bitcoin, well as that price of Bitcoin started go up, or any cryptocurrency or crypto jacking, started to spike along with it, which would make sense. And what crypto jacking is, is when you go to a site, and your computer downloads either via Trojan or some other mechanism, and your computer's actually starting to generate Bitcoin very, very small amounts. And matter of fact, it's usually not Bitcoin. It's a type of cryptocurrency called mo narrow, because Manero is more optimized for CPU. So we'll talk about more about that later. But just know that as the value of cryptocurrency goes up, so does crypto jacking. Now, when we talk about the virus companies, the antivirus companies needing to get samples. I mean, there's a whole host of them out there. But did you know that 24,000 malicious apps are blocked each and every day. Now a malicious application can need to be on a cell phone, whether it's iOS, or Android, or even application on your computer, but about 24,000 of them are blocked each day. Now, when there's some information and polls that were done, it was found that about 70% of folks aren't even prepared, if they were to have a lights out situation at their office, or on their computer at their house. So you can see that the market is ripe, you got cyber criminals that are trying to exploit computers, you got antivirus companies that are trying to stay ahead, and 70% of the people aren't even prepared. So that means that if you're not prepared, and your computer downloads a piece of ransomware, that means you're probably more likely to either pay that ransom. So that's where we're seeing a arms race. Now, how does all this get delivered? I mean, we've talked about viruses and Trojans and all of that, while still, the de facto standard for delivering the malware is still via email. And I know we said over and over and over, just be careful with those links that you click on. If it's too good to be true, you know, maybe taken, try to get a hold of the sender. See if it's legit. A lot of times when the email comes through, we call that phishing. And what they need to do is get you to click on something, or get you to not have antivirus installed so they can land and expand. You hear that all the time in our business land and expand. And so they know that email is tried and true, people will click on it a lot of times and that's how the viruses get onto your computer. So that's called phishing. Another way they do it because a lot of us are logged in to our I messages on our Macs is called smishing which is SMS phishing. And that's where they send you messages saying click here your Amazon package is on its way. So just know that the best way to protect yourself is be careful with stuff you click on via An email. And I don't know where they get this number from, but they say 76% of cybercrime is to make money. I don't know if they put a poll out and ask criminals if they could respond to it. But a lot of times the stuff that makes the news and the big headlines is this nation state. The Chinese government is hacking the US government and vice versa. But that is what we call state sponsored or nation state 76% Of all the Cybercrime out there, which that would be considered a cybercrime is to make money. Now 75% of consumers think their data is not safe. So that's another good stat there. So 70% aren't prepared 75% think their data is not safe. So the antivirus companies, they know that they already have a customer because they customer no 75% says their data is not safe. And the best way to secure your data is to start with good antivirus. Now, here's one, that's pretty sad. And this would be the last stat I'll leave you with. And that is 60% of cybercrime. And this ransomware targets small businesses. Now, why would they want to target small businesses? Well, if they go after a big business, chances are those big businesses, they have backups, they have very formal network operations teams, they have very mature capabilities. And also, they submit any virus samples, they get to the antivirus companies. And so the cybercriminal going after a big business, then there's a chance that they're probably going to get detected, and there's going to be an antivirus signature written that's going to take that virus and eradicate it from all computers. So what they target is, is the small business, the mom and pop businesses, the ones that may think that, hey, it's better just to pay $1,000 to get the ransomware key to unlock all my files. And so that's really sad. Just like when I've been involved in certain activity, that we were able to compromise ATM machines as a proof of concept strictly sanctioned aboveboard proof of concept. Well, those ATM machines, the ones that were the easiest compromised were the ATM machines that were normally used at Mom and Pop gas stations. And that's the part that's really sad is is because of you know, a lot of your large businesses, they have cyber insurance. And like I said, they have very robust capabilities. But you know, the cyber criminal if he can go after the small business, the one two computers, and maybe the real estate broker, that's a, you know, a single person shop, then they'll just pay it. So that's really sad that 60% of these are specifically targeting small businesses. Well, so we're coming up on the bottom of the half hour. And I just wanted to give you kind of the history of viruses and anti viruses, and kind of explain where all of this came from, and then tell you that no, antivirus companies do not write viruses to try to get people to buy their product, as demonstrated with a whole plethora of stats and figures, that that is not needed, just simply not needed, because there's so much of it out there. And it's only going to get worse. I mean, who would have thought that this would be a $6 trillion. That's 6 trillion with a tea industry. Just amazing. Well, I like to thank everybody that tunes in each and every week, sorry for not yam for not getting the podcast out last week. But as I mentioned, we'll make it up to you. So everybody, stay safe. Sanitize your hands. Wear your mask when you're around water people, if that's what makes you more comfortable. And just everybody be safe. And keep yourself from getting the COVID bars and keep your laptop, desktop, iPad, iPhone or Android from getting any of the other viruses that are out there. And with If this is your build commander global boss I will see you all next week