monline

[Mark's Sysinternals Blog] Since the release of the first antivirus products many people have believed in a conspiracy theory where antivirus companies generate their own market by paying virus writers to develop and release viruses. I don't subscribe to that theory and trust the major security vendors, but recent trends show that there's a fuzzy line between second-tier antispyware vendors and the malware they clean.

Actually I think that even some anti-virus companies might be (or might have been) affiliated with some virus-writers. It's pretty much trivial that the company -that is the first among the many competitors to offer protection against the newest and most serious threats- gets quite some advantage on the market, since their products will be the most successful in fighting virii/worms/etc. Generating new threats themselves and offering protection as the first ones is nothing that I couldn't imagine about big and money-hungry megacorps. :->

On the other hand, I think that the best anti-virus professionals became crime-fighters after having dived into the abyss themselves. You know: "set a thief to catch a thief".