Serious Discussion F-Secure - General discussions

stonjean633 said:
Seems that the F-Secure online scanner too now also use Avira SDK.

Previous version loads fast but this time it took a while. Then I saw in task manager it loads the EPP.

Cloudy days ahead at FSec and maybe that's one of the reasons MikkoH left.
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What happened there is Mikko spun the business off, as obviously the home software division was not bringing the necessary revenue and its dragging the company down.

F-Secure like a few other vendors has struggled to compete with the behemoths like Gen Digital, McAfee, Bitdefender and so on, and for years has relied mainly on their Finnish origins and partnerships with ISPs to sell.

So he span the business division off, and I’m assuming there’s been an out-of-contract price increase for the technology F-Secure (new) licenses from WithSecure (also new but holding all the assets and intellectual property). So most likely Gen Digital attracted them with a better offer.

Now the product is everything Avira.

That’s not to say it’s bad, Vipre for example is everything Bitdefender (even the Photon optimisations) and despite infrequent updates and so on, it is still an amazing product.

But yeah, you might as well just go for the originals at this point.
 
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stonjean633 said:
Ya man. I feel bad for FSec as they used to be good and now they could be struggling.

The pride of Norway ( Norman ) was acquired by AVG and now with Gen Stack, hope the pride of Finland lives longer.
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Well I can see in F-Secure financial reports (F-Secure is a public company so they are available), their revenue for the first half of 2025 is 72.9 mln euro.

Their operating expenses have been reduced 36.6%, of which 11.9% are from research and development.

That’s after 73% reduction of operating expenses in 2024, of which 25.4% were cuts in R&D.

So yeah, in comparison with the Gen Digital 3.9 BN predicted revenue for this year… 🤷🏻‍♂️
 
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Trident said:
Well I can see in F-Secure financial reports (F-Secure is a public company so they are available), their revenue for the first half of 2025 is 72.9 mln euro.

Their operating expenses have been reduced 36.6%, of which 11.9% are from research and development.

That’s after 73% reduction of operating expenses in 2024, of which 25.4% were cuts in R&D.

So yeah, in comparison with the Gen Digital 3.9 BN predicted revenue for this year… 🤷🏻‍♂️
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And if the forum is any indication of budget cuts, I'm not sure. But there haven't been any replies on the English side for about a week besides Ukko and I answering a couple each.

The Finnish side gets a little more attention, but that seems to have dropped off a bit as well. One post in a beta thread said the quarantine engineers were on vacation and the post question would be added to the queue for when they get back. I guess everyone from a department takes time off at the same time rather than staggered?

When you had previously mentioned all the people and resources $$ Bitdefender puts in R&D, yep, there is no way this little company can keep up with the likes of them and Gen Digital.

Using Avira's SDK is probably a cost cutting thing for them, in letting Avira maintain their SDK? Are those updated, kept up to date by Avira, or are those kits one and done and the host company keeps their misc engines and features up to date, advancing those?
 
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I will first answer the most important question:
Jonny Quest said:
Are those updated, kept up to date by Avira, or are those kits one and done and the host company keeps their misc engines and features up to date, advancing those?
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They are maintained by Avira (or whoever owns them). F-Secure has very little control over the technology (in fact most probably they don’t even get to examine the source code).
The way it works, F-Secure will negotiate an offer (which could be percentage of the license price or something else) with Avira. Avira will then supply them with the SDK and a guide. The guide includes how to integrate the engine (Via com interface, via Java, Perl, Net and everything that Avira supports).
F-Secure performs calls to the engine as described in the guide(which includes scanning, configuration, remediation and so on), the engine returns (detection names and so on).

The updates are hosted as the client (in this case F-Secure) desires, they could be retrieved from Avira directly, or the client can decide to host on their own infrastructure.

Now as to the revenue, yeah, others invest a lot in R&D and marketing (the two main areas F-Secure saves up on), so it won’t be easy to compete.
Gen Digital was probably smart and gave them an attractive offer, which is not surprising considering how many “free” (pay-with-your-data) Chinese antiviruses historically used Avira.
Now they’ve added more engines and SDKs but I guess it’s still cheaper for them.
 
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Trident said:
Well I can see in F-Secure financial reports (F-Secure is a public company so they are available), their revenue for the first half of 2025 is 72.9 mln euro.

Their operating expenses have been reduced 36.6%, of which 11.9% are from research and development.

That’s after 73% reduction of operating expenses in 2024, of which 25.4% were cuts in R&D.

So yeah, in comparison with the Gen Digital 3.9 BN predicted revenue for this year… 🤷🏻‍♂️
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72M vs 4B is too much. GEN is a behemoth and eating the competition.
 
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stonjean633 said:
72M vs 4B is too much. GEN is a behemoth and eating the competition.
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72 mln is for 6 months, so about 150 months euro (similar to last year) as opposed to Gen Digital 4BN,

McAfee not public (LLC) but estimated to be sitting at around 2 BN, Trend Micro 1.something billion (of which not a lot is through the home software division so they may be the next one to follow Norton, McAfee and F-Secure).

Bitdefender and Eset are at around 500 million euro revenue (according to web stats, they are both limited liability so they don’t report official details).

Jonny Quest said:
Thank you, Trident, especially on how the SDK's worked :)
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I am not developing antivirus software myself so they won’t tell me how the SDKs are managed, but there was documentation which Sophos “forgot” to secure up and it was the SAVDI engine developer guide. It has now been secured.

Developers can control a lot of parameters (they can decide what aggressiveness levels they want, do they want cloud lookups or not, do they want heuristics, file emulation). They also tell the engine which file(s) to scan, to remediate (in case they don’t have their own remediation tools) and so on.
The engine is in constant communication more often than not, through C++ COM interfaces, which will be registered at the time of installing the software (most probably an Avira official MSI will be included to do the installation and registration).
 
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Trident said:
72 mln is for 6 months, so about 150 months euro (similar to last year) as opposed to Gen Digital 4BN,

McAfee not public (LLC) but estimated to be sitting at around 2 BN, Trend Micro 1.something billion (of which not a lot is through the home software division so they may be the next one to follow Norton, McAfee and F-Secure).

Bitdefender and Eset are at around 500 million euro revenue (according to web stats, they are both limited liability so they don’t report official details).


I am not developing antivirus software myself so they won’t tell me how the SDKs are managed, but there was documentation which Sophos “forgot” to secure up and it was the SAVDI engine developer guide. It has now been secured.

Developers can control a lot of parameters (they can decide what aggressiveness levels they want, do they want cloud lookups or not, do they want heuristics, file emulation). They also tell the engine which file(s) to scan, to remediate (in case they don’t have their own remediation tools) and so on.
The engine is in constant communication more often than not, through C++ COM interfaces, which will be registered at the time of installing the software (most probably an Avira official MSI will be included to do the installation and registration).
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I hope Trend Micro stays as is. That was home for me and have lots of love to where I came from. Still got friends,batchmates and classmates there too.

There was a time that Microsoft was trying to acquire Trend. MS don't have defender yet by that time but the Chang owners didn't like the idea.if that happened,its gonna be called Trend Microsoft. Now I'm wondering IF that happened, Defender isn't born as TM will be the MS security division and the rest of the domino effect in the AV industry.
 
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stonjean633 said:
I hope Trend Micro stays as is. That was home for me and have lots of love to where I came from. Still got friends,batchmates and classmates there too.

There was a time that Microsoft was trying to acquire Trend. MS don't have defender yet by that time but the Chang owners didn't like the idea.if that happened,its gonna be called Trend Microsoft. Now I'm wondering IF that happened, Defender isn't born as TM will be the MS security division and the rest of the domino effect in the AV industry.
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In the end Microsoft did acquire someone to step on for building the Defender platform. GIANT AntiSpyware (acquired in 2004) was the foundation of Microsoft AntiSpyware or whatever (before even Security Essentials was launched there was that).
Later on (and through a series of acquisitions and investments) Microsoft expanded the engine to Anti-Malware (Microsoft Security Essentials) and after that was Windows/Microsoft Defender.

I also hope Trend stays as they are (and they don’t seem to be suffering) but there are rumours around that they may split the home and business divisions.
 
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Trident said:
In the end Microsoft did acquire someone to step on for building the Defender platform. GIANT AntiSpyware (acquired in 2004) was the foundation of Microsoft AntiSpyware or whatever (before even Security Essentials was launched there was that).
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They also acquired The Romain antivirus, RAV/Reliable Antivirus in 2003.
gecad.com

RAV Antivirus - Gecad Ventures

Antivirus Technology
gecad.com gecad.com
 
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I reported a couple of months ago as I remember the exe of Libre Wolf was reported as malicious, it took them over three weeks to acknowledge a FP? By this time I had removed F-Secure as whitelisting it wasn't totally effective, by this time Wolf had been updated so not sure if it would again be seen as malicious again?
 
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Trend will survive unless there's an offer the Chang's can't refuse. There are other smaller AV who will go off first before Trend. I hope Trend,Eset, Kaspersky, Bitdefender and Fse
Sorrento said:
I reported a couple of months ago as I remember the exe of Libre Wolf was reported as malicious, it took them over three weeks to acknowledge a FP? By this time I had removed F-Secure as whitelisting it wasn't totally effective, by this time Wolf had been updated so not sure if it would again be seen as malicious again?
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Depends if the exe is detected by hash,heuristics etc and if someone tested those in the labs. Try to upload the new exe in VirusTotal and see if Avira/Withsecure picks it up. VT is not always accurate but it will at least give you a clue.
 
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I really have given up with F-secure to be honest, I already knew the Wolf exe was not a malicious file, F-secure was the only AV that had issue with it anyway, (Emsisoft would notice the change & realise as as safe instantly as did ESET) As mentioned adding it to exceptions did not solve the issue & also as it was updated often it was just a nuisance that I don't need - I wont be renewing F-Secure again or installing it on other PC's I maintain as I did, I feel its a shadow of its former self years ago where it was very highly rated, a pity. - Just my opinion BTW. I wont comment again on this.
 
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