F-PROT Antivirus

» see f-prot.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In the internet cafes I sat in between 2002 and 2005, infections did not arrive by email. They arrived on a floppy and later on a USB stick, carried in by whoever needed to print something, and the operator dealt with it by booting the machine off a write-protected disk and running a scanner from that disk. F-PROT was built for exactly that job. The DOS executable was small enough to leave room on the floppy for the definitions.

Friðrik Skúlason wrote the first version in 1989 and called it Lykla-Pétur, after the saint who keeps the keys at the gate. By late 1990 version 1.13 could identify eleven viruses, which sounds absurd now and was a reasonable number then. Version 1.14 in January 1991 knew 157 virus families and more than 250 variants, and shipped F-DRIVER.SYS, a memory-resident monitor you loaded from CONFIG.SYS. He incorporated FRISK Software International in Reykjavík in 1993, the name folded out of his own.

The part that made it travel was the license. F-PROT for DOS was distributable by anyone and free to use for non-commercial purposes, definitions included, at a time when the alternative was a boxed product with a yearly subscription. That put it on shareware collections and magazine cover disks and inside the toolkits of people who fixed other people's computers for beer. The Linux build stayed free for home users the same way, for years after DOS was gone.

I cannot tell you that the disk in the cafe drawer had F-PROT on it rather than something else, because nobody looked and nobody would have said. What I can tell you is that the free non-commercial license is the reason a program written by one person in a country of a quarter million people was a plausible answer to that question anywhere in the world.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

F-PROT is generally credited as the first scanner to ship with a heuristic engine, meaning it would flag code that behaved like a virus rather than only code it had already been shown. In 1991 that was close to heresy. The industry had settled on signature matching and the trade was in who had the biggest list, and a program that guessed was a program that could be wrong in public.

It also stayed unfashionably small. While the American vendors were assembling suites with firewalls and registry cleaners and update schedulers, FRISK kept shipping a command-line scanner that did one thing and fit on removable media. That decision is why the product outlived its own era: when a machine was too infected to boot, the tool you wanted was the one that did not need Windows to be working.

~ the long tail ~

The Windows product went on into the 2000s, along with builds for Exchange, Linux, Solaris and AIX. It never won the consumer market and it was never really trying to. FRISK sold engine licenses and server scanning, kept the free home version running as a kind of standing advertisement, and stayed small in a business that had otherwise turned into a handful of very large companies buying each other.

The last stable release, 6.0.9.6, is dated 29 November 2011. After that the product was maintained rather than developed. Commtouch, an Israeli-American email security firm, completed the purchase of FRISK's antivirus business on 1 October 2012 and renamed itself Cyren in January 2014, and the F-PROT name became a line item on somebody else's product page.

~ the day it died ~

Cyren announced end-of-sale for the F-PROT endpoint products in August 2020, effective from the first of that month. Support and signature updates continued for another year and stopped on 31 July 2021. That second date is the real one. An antivirus with no definition updates is not a slower antivirus, it is a file browser with a scary icon.

Nothing dramatic happened. No lawsuit, no breach, no scandal. A company that sold threat intelligence to other companies looked at a thirty-year-old consumer brand it had bought as part of an engine deal and decided the support cost was not worth the line. The brand had outlived DOS by a quarter of a century, which for a piece of shareware is a long run.

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