Malwarebytes started its life as a company in 2004 as a one-man operation, but it wasn’t until four years later that its star product was released, simply called "Anti-Malware". Since then the company has rapidly grown to establish itself as a serious player in the computer security industry.
Based on a successful freemium model where users can clean already infected machines for free or get real-time protection to avoid future infections for a one-time fee, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware already counts hundreds of millions of downloads and over five billion infections cleaned.
We recently had the chance to chat with founder and CEO Marcin Kleczynski about the company’s early days, the evolution of malware, his views on the industry, and more.
Malwarebytes was a bootstrapped company and that usually makes for a unique story on how you got started. Tell us a bit about your background, what motivated you and how you went on creating the company.
Marcin: It’s actually a very interesting story. I was working at a computer repair shop in Chicago as a technician during my last year in high school. It was me and the owner of the store. Every time a computer came in we would basically reformat it, regardless if it had a minor infection. Rootkits were still new, Ad-Aware was still the popular software and threats were just starting to evolve. But I never quite understood why we would never try to attack the problem using tools that existed until I got infected at home. When that happened I tried McAfee, I tried Symantec, I tried a lot of stuff and nothing would remove the piece of malware.
Read: Interview with Malwarebytes" founder, Marcin Kleczynski
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