One midnight in June, Vincent Weafer, at home in Los Angeles, got the call from work: Users across the world were reporting a quick spreading computer virus. What later became known as Bugbear.B meant yet another all-nighter for Weafer, senior director of Symantec Security Response, the virus-busting unit behind the company's Norton AntiVirus software.
By the time Weafer -- who, as manager, coordinated outposts in Europe, Asia and the U.S. from home -- arrived at the Security Response team's global hub in L.A. later that morning, researchers had already defined the virus and produced a downloadable fix.
The stakes are high in Weafer's business (Symantec ranked as the top security software vendor in 2001, with a 15 percent market share of a $3.6 billion industry, according to Gartner Dataquest). In 2002, viruses, worms and other digital attacks caused between $44 billion and $54 billion in damage, according to British security firm mi2g. And digital attacks are on the rise -- the first five months of 2003 saw some 88,000 attacks, more than in all of 2002.
The Bugbear.B event began as a Category 3 -- "moderate" on the severity scale (top category 5 is "very severe") but serious enough (the virus can steal bank passwords) that every worker had to stay till the bug was stomped. Of his crew, Weafer says, "This is the thrill -- every time they find something new or significant you can see the adrenaline pumping."
While Huger sees neither hacker nor buster as winning the virus war, he does feel his caffeine-fueled team has a bigger arsenal. "We have millions of dollars of infrastructure to help us analyze these issues," he says. "Some of these virus authors are very bright, but this may be their first time. It's unusual that they come up with tricks we haven't seen."
