Cyber warrior

SYMANTEC'S CEO, Greg Clark, loves to fish. He's not choosy about the kind of fish he catches and his range goes from fly fish in rivers to "chasing monsters" in the ocean. He also catches some occasional salmon. And yes, he loves to cook his fish.

For a man who thinks catching cyber criminals and preventing them from causing harm is a vocation rather than a regular job, fishing is quite an apt hobby. There are all kinds of "fish", big and small, lurking in the backwaters of the World Wide Web ready to pounce on unsuspecting users of the Internet. Mr Clark and his team are the warriors who are ever ready to nab and protect users against increasingly sophisticated cyber criminals out to do harm.

Symantec, the world's largest cybersecurity company, has had a chequered history. It was founded in 1982 by Gary Hendrix with a US National Science Foundation grant and was originally focused on artificial intelligence (AI) related projects. The company's origins in AI research is significant as it is nowadays increasingly starting to use AI tools to fight cyber criminals.