The AV Community mourns for Klaus Brunnstein

Obviously, we are sad about the loss the AV community now has to cope with.
I got to know Klaus Brunnstein as a pleasant person with a strong stance.
He was a forward-thinker and thus has already alerted about the dangers of data mining more than 30 years ago.
He will be held in memory as an admonisher for the responsible handling with IT.

This is a loss, especially for the critical IT world. I still have a copy of the Hacker Bible from the eighties in my office. Brunnstein used this medium to comment critically on the population census at that time. He showed the data collected was not processed as anonymous as the officials had described.

Professor Klaus Brunnstein will remain in my memory as a pioneer and a strong fighter for virus protection. For several decades he accompanied the progress of our AV products. Intensive and constructive discussions set new impulses for ongoing improvements in anti-virus. I will miss his critical voice. 

I have known him personally for over 10 years, previously via Fidonet, and I have respected him as one of the pioneers of our industry. I have been in contact with Klaus, on a professional and private level, as a result from my former collaboration with Vesselin Bontchev. It fills me with deep sorrow to have lost not only a colleague but also a good friend.

A man we all will miss!

Klaus was one of the founders of CARO (the Computer Anti-Virus Research Organization), an organization that was established in 1990 to research and study malware. CARO was planning to create another official and public organization called EICAR, an organization aiming at antivirus research and improving development of security software. It was during the inaugural meeting of EICAR in Brussels, Belgium in 1991 that I’ve met Klaus for the first time. 

While talking to Klaus, I got to learn about so many new aspects of viruses and that made me being even more interested in this whole matter. Some of his ideas were very controversial while some others, on the contrary, were even very conservative. His ideas inspired me in a lot of security related topics, events and publications I touched, visited and launched afterwards. At least you could say that, without Klaus and my first encounter with a Trojan horse, back in 1989, I wouldn’t have been into the security industry at all.

I still remember Klaus from his interesting discussions and points of view on a closed security forum. Actually, I still have all of his feedback in my backup system. Some of these old mails range back 19 years! I always stayed in contact with Klaus and I have met him during many security related events like the early EICAR conferences in the nineties. 

During one of the latest CARO workshops, I told him about a book that I was writing and he told me that he always would be there in case I needed some advice. For that reason, I asked him, several months ago, to write an opinion chapter about the future of security for my book, called “Cyber Danger” (the German version “Cybergefahr” will be published later this year). I now do realize, that this will most probably be the last words he officially wrote in a book. Klaus will always be remembered as a pioneer. I am greatly saddened to have learned of his death yesterday. He contributed so much to the industry. 

Klaus, I still owe you a copy of my book! Somewhere. Sometime.