Israel21c
By Nicky Blackburn
September 12, 2004

Zak Dechovitch, the founder and managing director of tiny five-man start-up SecureOL, has a different approach to computer viruses, worms, and Trojan horses. Instead of fighting to keep them out, as everyone else is trying to do, he thinks we should just let them come on in. Once inside, however, his company has developed a new technology that prevents them from doing any kind of damage.

SecureOL's technology uses a new concept, 'security by virtualization', which not only contains virus attacks, but is also one of the first to protect users from intellectual property theft, cyber crime, and cyber terrorism. Each program runs on its own virtual computer along with its associated files. When viruses, worms or malicious codes attack, they think they are causing damage. In reality, however, they are isolated from the other programs in their own virtual environments, unable to cause harm to the PC or to any of the programs running on it.

"The technology creates a virtual computer for every program in the system," 26-year-old Dechovitch told ISRAEL21c. "It doesn't matter what is running, all that matters is that it is running by itself. It is as if each program is working on a clean computer and any damage, therefore, becomes irrelevant. The user is completely unaware of what is going on in the background. He works naturally as if he is on a normal computer. It also doesn't matter how many times you get a virus, it's just like rubbish on your hard drive, which you can delete easily when you feel like it."

Dechovitch, a computer whiz-kid who was programming computers from the age of five, and who established the Computer Crime Unit of the Israel Defense Force, came up with the idea behind SecureOL at the end of 2000 with a friend, Yaron Mayer. The two men were contemplating the home computer market, and how so many users today still cannot recognize a virus or malicious code. "We realized that if we could make everything run alone, then the home user would no longer have to care if a program was bad or not," says Dechovitch.

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