Interview with CyberSoft CEO Peter Radatti

"I'm Pete Radatti - founder and chairman of the CyberSoft Operating Corporation. I wrote the first version of the VFind™ Security Toolkit. This product primarily runs on Unix and Unix-like operating systems which means all of Unix, Linux, Mac OS X, and some other operating systems."

"Why did I create CyberSoft? Basically, I was interested in a difficult problem, which was: how do I detect parasitic viruses in a Unix environment. This was way back at the very beginning - before there really were any virus scanners, there were some viruses. At that time, I was the first person to see a heterogeneous infection; that is, we had a Sun Microsystems Unix computer with attached PCs, and the viruses were attacking files on the server because they were remotely mounted to the PC. So I actually had to write a scanner capable of detecting those files and solving the problem. That really was a very interesting problem to me."

"VFind™ was the first product in the VFind™ Security Toolkit. Originally, it started out life as a virus scanner running on Unix; however, at that time I was also heavily involved in computational lexical analysis, so very quickly, I realized that those things that make virus scanning easy also make lexical analysis easy, so I started almost from the beginning incorporating those features necessary for not just lexical analysis, but data pattern analysis. So what happened was that VFind™ was capable of finding any kind of data in any kind of file."

"There are different levels of the toolkit; not everybody needs everything, so they get charged less if they don't need everything. So the first toolkit is the VFind™ Security Toolkit, the second toolkit is the VFind™ Security Toolkit Professional, which includes Avatar. I've seen programs like Avatar sell for as much as $80,000.00 per copy - we don't charge anywhere near that amount, and you get an entire toolkit!"

"Avatar maintains the baseline of a system as set by security rules that you incorporate into a database. If there's any deviation from the baseline configuration, the Avatar system puts it back to where it belongs and notifies somebody. There are a number of interesting things you can do with Avatar, because you're basically looking at a baseline configuration. You can use Avatar for things other than computer security response and baseline management."

"It's actually more than a tool - it's a toolkit, which is why we call it the VFind™ Security Toolkit. There are many tools in the toolkit, and most of the tools have multiple functions...VFind™ has the ability to scan for viruses, to scan for unsolicited bulk email, to scan for trade secret or confidential information - it can scan for just about any information you want. The UAD product breaks files down so that they can be scanned more efficiently - this is very unique...I don't believe anybody else has something like the UAD product. It will actually examine a file to determine what it is and then act upon it depending upon it's examination. Very unique. Most other products out there that have anything even similar to this just use the file name extension as an indication of what the file is - UAD does not do that. There's the Cryptographic Integrity Tool which will not only tell you every file that has been added, deleted, modified, or duplicated on the system (which is useful if you're looking for a software mythology attack or even a hacker attack), but it will also tell you who's doing what on your computer. Whenever someone is using a computer, it always leaves traces in the file system - the Cryptographic Integrity Tool very quickly allows you to find out who is doing things on your computer...who's working, who's not working, which authorized users are taking unauthorized actions. There are also other things that you can do with both VFind™ and CIT - for example: if you have a file that's missing, but you know either the cryptographic hash of the file, or you know some pieces of the file, you can find it using one of those two tools."

"SafeInternetEmail basically was something we created in our own laboratory for our own use originally, and once we realized that it had commercial value, then we added all the bells and whistles necessary to bring it out to market. We noticed very early on that the primary mode of software attacks was moving to email and the internet, so we created a way of intercepting all of our email - both incoming and outgoing - scanning it for viruses and other data. Remember that I said that VFind™ can do any kind of pattern analysis? Well, we load one copy of VFind™ with all of the VDLs (Virus Definition Language) for all the viruses. We also load it for unsolicited bulk email - A.K.A. "spam". We can also load it with other things - for example: we have source code that we don't want out of the building, so we can put a VDL in there that basically defines what our source code looks like, and if it sees some of our source code going out via email, it'll block it and notify somebody that this happened. So it's basically kind of a universal email scanner that allows you not only to scan for things that we want to scan for, but anything that the end user wants to scan for in addition."

"Our product is far superior to everyone else - I actually do believe that. There are a lot of reasons for that - one of which is that we have a lot of features and functionality that I have never seen in any other product. Even if we took several other company's products and put them together, they still wouldn't have all the features and functionality of our products. Plus, a lot of our competitor's products are monolithic - they do what they do what they do and nothing else. our products are tools - consequently, they can be used not only for what we anticipated them to be used for, but for many other things."

"We are operating on every continent on the planet - in addition to platforms that are operating in orbit and under the sea. If they are running Unix, definitely they should be interested in our products. When you compare our product as just a virus scanner to our competitor's products, we're very price-competitive with them, and we have all the rest of the tools in there, and all the rest of the features. We are always upgrading all of the products, and the computer security world is not a static field. There are always new threats and new problems to be solved, and we respond to them."

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