It all started in Romania…

…at a company called GeCAD. Established in 1992 by Radu Georgescu, GeCAD originally focused on creating computer-aided design (CAD) software. In 1994, however, it reached out to Costin Raiu about distributing a commercial version of a virus scanner he had been distributing for free. Raiu had gained interest in viruses after a virus called BadSectors.3428 infected his school as a youth. He spent that evening writing his first successful cleaner utility to help remediate this virus, the whole time worried someone else would beat him to it. Afterward, he got requests from his friends to reverse-engineer other viruses and create cleaner tools for them as well. Eventually, this led to Raiu developing and freely distributing a full-fledged antivirus scanner called Mscan. Once acquired by GeCAD, the first antivirus software produced was named RAV (short for RSN Antivirus, though the name behind the acronym was later changed to Reliable Antivirus) and sold commercially.

Partnered with Raiu at GeCAD on the RAV development project was Mady Marinescu, and in the early days, the rest of the team was mostly comprised of recent university graduates writing virus definitions at a small kitchen table. In 1998, Raiu moved on to a new opportunity at Kaspersky Lab just a year after it was established, most likely due to becoming friends with Eugene Kaspersky over virus definition conversations online. That same year, GeCAD shifted focus heavily to (email server) security. It offered antispam and content filtering for Exchange but also for other common email platforms such as Sendmail and qmail. Development on RAV continued by Mady and team, and though it was considered a cross-platform product, development at GeCAD was primarily focused on meeting the growing security needs of Linux users. This is ironic because, in 2003, the RAV technology and its developers were acquired by Microsoft.

Cold snack

Note that in the late 90s, the focus of security solutions was mostly on viruses. Malware and spyware became popular later, around the year 2000.