My journey into the word of cyber security began in 1999, while working at Northwestern University. Having recently graduated with a Masters in Jazz Pedagogy I found myself supporting several hundred users and systems across three locations. The first significant email worm exploded across campus and faculty, staff, and students at our remote site, some 700 miles away, were reportedly part of the casualties. Planning for the worst, I began developing a cleaning application (programming was a hobby and I sought out opportunities to gain experience). I quickly distributed the program to those impacted and any crisis was averted. Demand around campus was high, so I threw up a free website on xoom.com (different xoom than today), and before long I had exceeded 100,000 downloads. Building on early success, the name getvirushelp.com was registered and the site built out further. While the site wasn’t quite at the top of the search results for those seeking help with the virus, I reached out to the owners of the top sites and saw a boost in downloads exceeding 1 million after a link was added to the geocities.com site ranked #1 on the Yahoo! results page.
I continued researching and analyzing malware as I was able to obtain samples, built other cleaners, and added information to getvirushelp.com.
A year and a half after the start of it all I was working my dream job, protecting millions of users from malware full time, after having been recruited by one of the top anti-virus firms, McAfee (then Network Associates).
Years later I found out that it was one of the top researchers at McAfee who referred me to management, he was also the owner of the geocities site atop Yahoo’s search results.
P.S. The infection report, of that remote office 700 miles away, were exaggerated and they were spared and didn’t need cleaner after all.
