I’m Marcin Kleczynski and This Is the Malwarebytes Story
At the age of 14, Marcin Kleczynski had a problem: after downloading video games from dubious Internet sources, he accidentally infected his family computer with malware. Who among us hasn’t faced this apparently boring teenage crisis?
Traditional antivirus software didn’t work, and Marcin had to dig deep to find a solution to his malware problem. But as a result of this research, he apparently caught another type of error, and continued to research malware and viruses out of curiosity, collaborating with other volunteers on the Internet.
This hobby grew over the years as Marcin learned to program and what started out of necessity eventually grew into his own product and company. The Malwarebytes team now has over 320 employees, and its various products have been downloaded approximately half a billion times. Not a bad place for something that started on the family computer in the basement. We spoke with Marcin to find out a little more about his experience fighting malware.
Tell us how Malwarebytes came to be. You started out as a teenager and ran into an infection in your system, right? Apparently, you decided to take matters into your own hands!
I was definitely young and still lived in my parents’ basement. We had a shared family computer, which I practically destroyed by downloading a stolen video game. We had an antivirus installed which missed the malware. The pop-ups didn’t stop and the whole family blamed me. I took matters into my own hands and found help in the form of an online support forum. A volunteer helped me get rid of the malware manually in fifty steps. I was grateful, but after this event I decided that there must be a better way to get rid of the malware.
Were you already an experienced programmer, or were you learning along the way when you decided to create your own tool?
Believe it or not, I learned to program from the book “for dummies”. This is the yellow one that you are embarrassed to read in public. After releasing the first version of the product, I entered the University of Illinois and completed my degree in Computer Science.
Why did the project keep growing? Are you just fascinated by malware? Or was it more of an opportunity — that is, you saw a large gap in the marketplace that traditional antivirus software could not effectively protect against?
There was both. I fell in love with how malware works, but I also wanted to be some kind of superhero. I’ve seen traditional antivirus programs fail and have let malware into my computer with my own eyes. My partners and I decided to make the world a better place by repairing one computer at a time.
How did you choose which platforms to target and which to ignore or wait?
We started with Windows, which was the main source of attacks for most criminals at the time. We waited to introduce mobile and Mac products until recently, in part because we didn’t see them as a serious threat, and as a startup, we just didn’t have the resources to do whatever we wanted right away. …
At what point did it go from being a hobby to something that you figured could become a business?
I think it was more gradual than most people think. There was not a single point in the history of the company to which I would point out, but towards the end of 2008, revenues rose sharply, and I think that this was a very sobering thing for me and my partners.
What was your biggest obstacle and how did you overcome it?
Being such a fragmented and remote company was a big obstacle. When I was at the University of Illinois, I wasn’t even in the office. We had to sort out many communication problems and remember how we shared information with each other.
How do you effectively deal with user inquiries and criticism?
I have personally handled all support calls since 2008 and so we were able to quickly get feedback built into the product. Today, if I receive an email from a user or customer, I will always reply to it. I’m even trying to hack the ticket support system to get access to tickets; the support team doesn’t like it. In the end, I prefer to get negative reviews because I can make concessions and fix it!
Now how do you divide the time between developing new features and managing existing ones? Obviously, you need to defend against the latest threats, but how can you innovate beyond the status quo that people expect from antivirus / virus software?
I found that if it’s all in one command, there is no way to solve this problem. There will always be a battle for the division of time. So we created a whole separate team. Our tech team mostly plays in the virtual sandbox all day and tries ideas that might sound crazy but might work. In this lab, we created our anti-rootkit and ransomware technologies.
What advice would you give to others looking to take on a similar project?
Build a product in a community that is passionate about what you create. They will be your first customers, provide you with amazing feedback that you can appreciate in real time, and become your biggest evangelists to help make your product go viral.