VirusBuster

» see virusbuster.hu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Antivirus used to be a local industry. Every country with a serious computer science faculty seemed to grow one in the late eighties, because viruses spread on floppies passed between people who knew each other, and the person best placed to take a sample apart was down the corridor. Slovakia produced ESET out of exactly that arrangement and Romania produced BitDefender. Hungary produced this.

Whatever was scanning the machines I used was foreign, and I never once wondered where it had been written. That is the honest distance here. An antivirus is a product you evaluate on a single axis, whether it catches the thing, and the nationality of the people who built the signature file is the least interesting fact about it to anyone except them.

The company's legal predecessor was shipping antiviral tools in the late 1980s under the name Virsec. The rename to VirusBuster came in 1992, and VirusBuster Ltd. was formally founded in 1997 as a Hungarian-owned firm aimed squarely at its home market, with the government sector as the anchor customer. That is a narrow base and also a durable one: a ministry does not switch vendors because a review scored someone else higher.

Between 2000 and 2003 the product line widened across platforms and moved from single scanners into layered protection. Then came the move that defined the rest of its life. In 2001 an Australian company, Leprechaun Software, licensed the VirusBuster engine and shipped it inside its own products. Over the next five years that became the actual business, with the detection engine sold to other security vendors and a push into the American market that never produced a brand anyone there could name. Partners of the period included Microsoft and Novell.

~ the dossier ~

~ the shape of the business ~

An antivirus engine is one of the few products where the wholesale half can quietly outlive the retail half. The buyer wants the detection and the virus database, and has no interest at all in the name on the box, because the name on the box will be theirs. So a company that lost the shelf can keep earning for years by disappearing into other people's shelves.

Agnitum in St Petersburg was one of those buyers, and had been shipping VirusBuster detection inside its Outpost security suite since 2006. Six years of that is long enough for the licensee to work out exactly what it is renting and exactly what it would cost to own. In August 2012 Agnitum announced it had acquired the antivirus technology, the virus database and the surrounding processes outright, which is the tenant buying the building. By October the owner of VirusBuster had decided the products and the services would come off the market. There was no dramatic failure and no lawsuit. The asset had already been sold, and what was left was a name.

~ what happened to the buyer ~

On 9 December 2015 Yandex bought Agnitum, and the stated reason was to put the technology into Yandex Browser. What followed was the standard sequence. Direct and partner sales of the Outpost line stopped that same month, virus database updates ran on into the first days of 2017, and the Agnitum site and its user forum went dark at the start of that March. Customers were pointed at Kaspersky keys on the way out.

So the engine wrote its way through three owners in five years and ended up as a safety layer inside a browser, which is roughly where all consumer antivirus ended up anyway. The Hungarian company that built it is gone and virusbuster.hu answers nothing. The Russian company that bought it is gone and its forum went with it. Somewhere in a browser's protection stack there is code with a Budapest accent, and no user-facing thing left anywhere that will admit to it.

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