Recent headlines from Estonia claiming that hackers linked to Russia have brought down Estonian government websites demonstrates how important it is to secure computers and networks against the increasing complexity of viruses, worms and similar threats.
One Finnish company that has been at the forefront of this field is F-Secure. Founded in 1988, the firm is a fast-growing niche player in the field of content security solutions, primarily anti- virus and spamware.
With each release of an operating system or upgrade of an application, new vulnerabilities - and potentially new viruses - appear. Reaction speed matters. If a virus-protection update is delivered only three hours faster, it can reduce the probability of infection by whole orders of magnitude. By contrast, receiving an update just 60 seconds too late can mean your whole operating system being disabled. F-Secure says its ability to release updates for diverse, unpredictable new threats as they appear makes its software a reliable choice.
Computer viruses, now almost 25 years old, were first created by a US student, Fred Cohen, who created one as an experiment in computer security. Since then, virus writers have been able to adapt to new technology, finding and exploiting loopholes at an alarming pace in even the newest, most secure programs. The infamous Melissa virus, which attacked computers in March 1999 and was the first to use email, sent a copy of itself to the first 50 people in the victim’s address book. It was soon followed by the Love Bug virus in 2000, which spread much faster than Melissa and mailed itself not to the first 50 people in the address book but to everyone. There are now some 60,000 viruses in existence.
Corporate boards have long been aware of the potential dangers that viruses and individual hackers can cause. Providing security to these businesses has been the mainstay of F-Secure’s revenue growth.
To get its software to the personal consumer, F-Secure continues to increase the number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to which it offers security solutions that are bundled on to the ISPs customers. It leads Europe in this area, with a market share of 34 per cent, and has gained a strong position in North-America with a market share of 10 per cent.
At the end of last year F-Secure had a total of 136 ISP partners operating in 34 countries. The company is now on a drive to get these ISPs to promote the software and get households to sign up.
One endorsement of the company’s track record came in mid-May with the announcement that Microsoft had selected F-Secure as the first data security vendor for its Windows Home Server. The upcoming Microsoft product is designed to help families more easily centralise, share and protect their digital assets, such as photos, music and video.
F-Secure’s products keep themselves up-to-date with the latest protection against new threats, and need no user intervention. The only downside is that they remove a convenient excuse as to who deleted your partner’s favourite photos.
Its consumer-focused flagship product, F-Secure Internet Security 2007, has won a number of awards recognising the firm’s technical expertise. It was nominated for Best I Test by PC World Norway, and was Editor’s Choice in the Windows News publication in France.
F-Secure’s newest and most exciting potential niche is the hitherto untapped market of security solutions for mobile communications equipment. The firm is in a leadership position, and has stated that it expects mobile revenues (at present between 1 and 2 per cent of the company’s total) to develop materially this year. It is already well-positioned with a number of large mobile operators, including mobile giant Nokia.
The company believes that mobile e-mail will be the driver that turns mobile anti-virus into a serious business. The number of known mobile viruses targeting operating systems already exceeds 300.
If the company maintains its technological and market leadership, this is one F-word I won’t bleep out of the portfolio.
Peter Jarvis is manager of the F&C European Dynamic Fund. Derek Pain is away
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