Even though we have been living with digital viruses for a relatively short time, they have become an everyday reality that we are often unaware of. According to data from experts, 560,000 new malware programs are detected every dayThere are currently more than 1 billion malware programs. Every minute, 4 companies are attacked by ransomware. To better understand this situation, we spoke with Bernardo Quintero, director of security engineering at Google and founder of VirusTotal, the first cybersecurity company in Spain.
“I come from the Spectrum generation,” Quintero explains in a telephone conversation. “I started programming when I was 10 years old, I researched the Basic language and it was not enough for me to program the games I wanted. When I was 14, I put in a floppy disk and a virus appeared, the ping-pong virus. That was in 1988. I knew how to program and I did a bit of reverse engineering with video games, I researched that program, that virus and I discovered that it was self-replicating, it reproduced itself on other computers“I researched how to prevent it and stuck to it.”
A few years later, Quintero maintained his interest in computer science and began his studies at the University of Malaga. There, The first year, the university was infected by a virus And, as a course work, the then student developed an antivirus for the educational center.
“I called it 2610 because it was the number of bits that the virus occupied and years later they called it the Malaga Virus,” Quintero confirmed. “That’s how I started and when the Internet arrived it was a boom. Then I made a security news bulletin, the first cybersecurity news site in Spain and had 20,000 subscribers in 1999“It was a niche topic, but very few people talked about it. From that moment on, audits started coming in and I founded the first cybersecurity company in the country.”
Five years passed and in 2004 launches one of the first local commercial antiviruses and in 2009 it created the total protection service, Virus Total, a sort of Alexandrian library for cyber viruses. The problem began when it had more and more clients and more and more viruses arrived: there was no way to store so much “knowledge” and it had to expand its operation. This is when Google came along, with its cloud system. But… How to contact them?
“What I did was look for scientific studies that talked about malware and Google,” Quintero says, “I contacted one of the authors and wrote to him telling him what I was doing and gave him the usernames and passwords for our service so he could see our work from the inside. He found that funny, he didn’t always answer me, but the relationship lasted about 4 months until he wrote to me and put me in contact with a colleague of his who I was very interested in what I was doing and they started using Virus Total. After a short while, they told me that they already used it a lot and that they wanted to be clients. My answer was that I was interested in them as partners, in order to scale all the information they had, for example, to be able to use the Cloud. They gave me all this service and in exchange I gave them access to Virus Total, until 2012, when they bought it.”
After Google came Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, who not only used Virus Total to protect themselves internally, including for users, for example, in Gmail or Google Drive. And then comes artificial intelligence and the difficulties that this technology brings with it when it comes to cybersecurity issues.
“Artificial intelligence is a neutral technology – Quintero confirms -, it depends on the use we give it, and for programming it is easier to generate mutations of a known code and It is capable of generating a thousand variants of a code. And that is one of the main problems. The good part is that we are doing code analysis that used to be a very manual job and now we can do it very quickly thanks to generative AI. It is capable of doing the most basic but tedious tasks. For example, a task that takes us hours, takes AI less than a minute. If we take into account that we receive 1.2 million new files every day, never seen before, it was impossible until now to know if they were viruses or benign files. So, as a sieve, it is great for us. And what we discovered is that About 50% of these files are malicious.. Up to date and automatically generated. We have been overwhelmed in the industry for years by this issue.”
One of the problems cybersecurity experts face is that it is a race against time: they can hardly act until they identify the virus. They are always “late.” That is why AI gives them a break. Quickly identify which files might be infected. At least until 5G technology arrives.
“The characteristics of 5G improve certain authentication properties compared to 4G, but the problem is that the attack surface has been greatly expanded – reflects Quintero -. It’s not just cell phones or computers, everything is vulnerable now. There is an example from 2017 when a Las Vegas casino was robbed of all of the customers’ information: credit cards, emails, names… And when doing the forensic analysis to find out how they had gotten in, they discovered that they had done it through the smart thermometer in the fish tank in the hotel lobby. That smart thermometer was connected to the casino network and due to a vulnerability in the thermometer’s software, they were able to get in. This happened in 2017… Everything that is connected is vulnerable.”
Everything connected is vulnerable. And that includes us. Even though we are often not aware of it. So it is obvious that more information and training is needed. Part of this has been done by INCIBE together with Google and Women4cyber, which through an initiative They have trained more than 98,000 users with online and in-person coursesIn fact, since the cybersecurity centre opened in Malaga, led by Quintero, more than 200 SMEs and more than 2,500 cybersecurity students and professionals have been trained.
“We lack a lot of awareness regarding this problem,” Quintero concludes. “In my time there was a big difference between the real world and the digital world, today that line hardly exists. I think we are not aware of how vulnerable we are. People talk about digital natives… The youngest learn to consume, they are digital consumersbut not so much to use technology responsibly. A lot of education and training is needed from a young age to create critical thinking and understand what they are seeing and experiencing. Personally, I fear humans more than technology. I know there is a lot of debate about AI, but I think that in the future we will establish a society and that there will be a time of prosperity in which we will be more productive. It is logical that there will be a time of tension now, but then we will evolve, something that characterizes us as humans.”