Travis Witteveen, Avira - NOAH17 Berlin

Hi everyone, we're celebrating our 30th birthday this year. Sounds strange for an internet software company, but security, which we've been in, has been around the moment that people started to connect computers, and that's of course when we started in this wonderful world. Security has been changing, and we've been seeing ourselves as a start-up because every time new services and new devices are introduced, we have to rethink how do we continue to protect the people on the internet as these services evolve. In that, conferences like this show you that those three driving motivating factors - better, cheaper, faster - means that this evolutionary revolution is not going to stop. When we look at these services, whether they're new operating systems or new ways to buy products or ways to interact, every time that this happens, more value is being produced. Not only value, but also on the other side, areas of interest from potentially people who want to misuse it or abuse that value that's being created. This evolution has been going on for the last 30 years, and we see a second round that doesn't change it but even adds on to the complexity that we're dealing with, and that is the devices. So everybody knows the traditional laptops and Windows and Mac and the other operating systems in the UNIX areas that we pretty much understand. The threat level is huge, it keeps us busy every day and every night. The smartphones were introduced, Android, iOS, there are different threats, different ways that hackers or that people with malicious intent can infect you and grab information or do something else to prevent you from doing what you want. But of course, wearables, your home automation systems, your automobiles, they're all starting to connect, and they're all coming from various various places, various manufacturers in the world, and they're all interconnecting, which of course makes our world an extremely complex place to deal with.

And with this interconnectivity, we have the issue of trust. Who else is there? What service providers are behind my internet-connected TV? Where are those advertising profiles being built? How are they being built on me? Two years ago, we had an interesting situation where the microphone of the mobile phone was being used to listen to what's happening in your house, and they would understand what TV channels or music channels you were listening to and could optimize their advertising based on that listening behavior. Many of the new internet-connected TVs are constantly sending profile data out about you to some service provider. Now, of course, you can read that somewhere in the general terms and conditions, but nobody reads those handbooks, and many of them are even online or out of date. We also have the problem that with all these devices being introduced, software on these devices are usually the biggest problem. If they get out of date or there's becoming a known risk, some way to break that software. Now, can we guarantee that is updated? Can we guarantee that the manufacturer will continue to maintain it? When we look at the products we have in our household, while the phone we might throw out every two years and get a new one, many of the other devices - the microwaves, the ovens, the dishwashers, the household lighting systems - we expect to hold those for many more years. Will the service be maintained? Can we continue that level of protection? So these are the challenges we have. And of course, because of these challenges, the risk dynamic is exponential. The services already made it, and now on top of it, the devices, it's just making an extremely complicated world for the average user. Hey, all I want to do is be faster, better, cheaper, and I want to use these things to be able to enable me to do that. And so we as a company have the challenge to put that worry behind the user so that the user doesn't need to think about it. User can go out and exploit those new services, those new tools to make their life better, faster, and cheaper. After all, that's the wonderful thing, that's why we're even here in this room.

So when we look at this world and we see it evolving, a viewer has to evolve with it. We went on from the systems to manufactured OS, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and now we're going into this new world of devices. But in order to be able to scale, we have to think about the world entirely different. We can't have researchers looking into everything, it is impossible, there's too many variations. We need to move, and we have moved, and we've been lucky that we've moved already six years ago. We moved into artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies that gave us the capability that even though we're one of the smaller vendors in the industry, we're able to be ranking number one or number two in all the independent test labs about our technology. And how can we do that? Well, one, we gave away our products as of '99 for free, so our core products are all for free. We have a relatively large user base around the world. In markets where we found difficult to enter, such as China, we actually licensed our technology to the big players in those markets, so we've been able to access even larger community through licensing our core technology. And our core technology gives us the ability to see, we have visibility on what's happening in the world. We can see trends, we can see infection rates, we can see changes of behavior, we can see new devices coming online. And through that visibility, we have machines in the background that start categorizing and filtering and defining groups and saying, 'Oh, that machine looks like it's a video camera if I compare it to the other 200,000 machines that I have. Yes, it is, and it's from that brand.' And now I can start to profile that device and sit there and say, 'What is its normal behavior versus what could be considered abnormal behavior?' I can start to do research on that device through the machine. Are the new software versions? Are their standard passwords and usernames to access it? How can I help that user have that security that they need without them having to worry about it and do it all automatically? Already we have more than a billion - a billion, it's a big number - of threat detections every month. That means somebody has tried to infect a machine where we are on. This is a huge thing, but the users, they don't need to worry. And that's what our attempt is, to continue to push the limit on what can machine do, what can artificial intelligence, machine learning do, so that we're able to continue to provide that service so that users can do what they want to do, which is to be better, faster, cheaper, and do things in the world, and we are making sure that they have the confidence to do that.

We have a workshop shortly afterwards downstairs if we want to deepen into the conversation and see actually what the technology looks like. We're happy to share. A couple other interesting facts about Avira I might want to add. We talked a lot about charities in the last day and a half. So in Germany, we take 20% of our revenue, not profit, revenue, and we directly put it into a charity. Our company has been built on helping people. Free software, security is a right not a privilege. Charity investment right from the top of the line. And those are the things that we've been built on, and those are the things we'll continue to do. Thank you very much for listening. Have a good day.