Chen: Actually I was the first one to say that. Last year I said the antivirus industry sucks. We were all competing on something that was irrelevant: our detection rates. You're at 100 percent detection rate this minute, the next minute it's down to 70 percent. What's the point of that competition?

There are really two industries fighting. The hackers, they are attacking the antivirus industry's infrastructure. How? First, they created all these variants and all these downloaders. They knew that the whole industry was competing against each other for detection rate. So when they came out with all these variants, it forced all the antivirus companies to add lots of pattern files. Those pattern files got so bloated because of the competition, [that] one it [created] lots of false alarms. So people hated antivirus for so many popups and false alarms. Second, the performance got really bad, so users tended to disable it. Two years ago there was a survey, called "The Most Hated Application," and antivirus -- not ours, but antivirus -- was on the top. So they attacked the whole antivirus industry in this way and therefore if we continue to compete with the detection rate thing, it just plays into their hands.

The second way they attacked antivirus infrastructure is the fake AV. If you look at this, they can fake any other application. Why do they fake AV? They make money and also they ruin antivirus companies' reputations and confidence in the whole antivirus industry.

Can you imagine our support engineers getting phone calls, "Hey your antivirus did not detect these viruses. This other antivirus detected all these viruses for me." And we have to explain to them, "No no no, that antivirus is actually a virus." It's a large burden for the antivirus [industry] to defend ourselves and to defend against that kind of bad reputation.