Back in June of 1992, I joined Symantec’s nascent antivirus team as a scruffy intern after a brief stint with the Norton Commander and Norton Desktop teams. At the time, Norton AntiVirus was a third-tier product with virtually no market-share. But that was about to change. That summer, Symantec hired over a dozen contractors to drastically improve Symantec’s detection rate and make us a world-class product. To give you an idea, back in 1993, top-notch products detected about 1,400 virus strains.
Over the course of that summer, and during my follow-up internships over the next few years, my teammates and I quickly realized that viruses were evolving at an extremely rapid pace, and would soon prove impossible for NAV’s core detection engines to detect. A detection engine is the heart and brains of the antivirus product; it performs all of the actual virus fingerprint scanning, and ours was quickly becoming obsolete.
