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It’s not that he meets people who won’t book a cruise for fear of sailing off the edge of the world. Rather, it’s a mentality he’s talking about: how people or companies persist in clinging to what he believes are old ways of thinking about protecting computers against hackers, viruses, and the like.
During his residency and internship at what is now MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland (1983 to ’85), his emergent—almost accidental—software business took off. Working 120 hours a week at the hospital, Dr. Tippett struggled to keep up with the demands of distributing software and, later, self-branded PCs to nonprofits. He used the money he made as an intern to hire a programmer. “In the end, I decided, why don’t we just make a company and do this software thing? We made a for-profit called FoundationWare.” The new company operated out of his dining room. In 1987, as the FoundationWare team contemplated what new software to develop, the world’s first major computer virus hit. “I read about the Lehigh virus and, being a biochemist, my little brain applied the standard petri-dish type growth. I thought, ‘Jeez, if this works the way it says it does, sooner or later every computer in the world is going to need an antivirus product.’ “I started telling people this and they didn’t believe me. We basically threw away the business plan we had been working on, and, for the next five weeks, created the first antivirus product. We called it Vaccine.” So, you developed the software that became Norton AntiVirus? “We took Vaccine to the trade shows. We demonstrated how it worked with three or four viruses that existed at that point.” Over the next several years, Dr. Tippett grew the company, moving it into an actual office, hiring up to fifty employees. He even gave it a new name: Certus. Although the company earned revenue, he continued working in Cleveland-area emergency rooms to help the company remain financially solvent. “Then, in 1992, Symantec came along,” Dr. Tippett says. “They had a product called Norton AntiVirus, but it didn’t work very well. They called us up and said, ‘Your product is winning all the awards and doing great things. How about if we buy your company?’ So I sold my company and my product became the Norton AntiVirus.”
But Dr. Tippett liked calling his own shots. When the Symantec contract ended in 1995, he took the CEO position of a fledgling ten-employee company in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, called NCSA, short for the National Computer Security Association (it later morphed into ICSA, then TruSecure). This move also ended his moonlighting in medicine. Bob Bales, NCSA co-founder, recruited Dr. Tippett. “Peter’s vision is what really attracted us to him—seeing things as they might be rather than as they are,” he says. “We had been struggling for four years and didn’t seem to be able to break even. Here we are ten years later, and the company did close to $50 million in revenue last year.” TruSecure now employs nearly 300 people and serves some 700 clients—private companies and government agencies—in forty-three countries. Ernst & Young recognized Dr. Tippett in 1998 with its Entrepreneur of the Year award. In 2002, InfoWorld Media Group named him one of the “25 Most Influential CTOs.”  TruSecure takes a different approach to computer security. Please elaborate. “Last year, there were more than 4,000 new vulnerabilities. What the rest of the world does is run around saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be horrible if somebody attacked that vulnerability? I better fix that.’ We wind up with this tremendous amount of work, and nobody succeeds in getting a quarter of it done. So when attacks do come, everybody’s still vulnerable. “When you actually do the science, 25 out of those 4,000 things were used as an attack against any organization—well under one percent.” Dr. Tippett doesn’t talk about eliminating each threat; he talks about reducing risk. TruSecure helps clients use resources they already have—no expensive new software, no need to hire computer experts—to protect themselves against threats. TruSecure expects clients to adopt certain defensive strategies and respond when they get warning alerts. TruSecure takes care of the rest; namely, figuring out what vulnerabilities pose problems and how to fix them. To this end, the company tracks hackers, collects samples of attacks worldwide, and develops sophisticated models to predict future events. Not everyone buys into Dr. Tippett’s way of thinking, just as not everyone believed him when he predicted the magnitude of the threat posed by viruses back in 1987. But Marcus Ranum, the man credited with building the first commercial firewall, and who once counted himself among the naysayers, says he was swayed after spending time with the technologist. He also considered how he safeguarded his home computer—smart habits and a few sensible precautions—and realized it was not unlike what Dr. Tippett advocated. Last fall, Mr. Ranum signed on as a senior technologist at TruSecure. “As much as Peter sounds like he’s always talking marketing, he’s one of the better thinkers in security these days,” he says. “He’s the Energizer Bunny. He’s this constant flood of bubbling ideas: ‘Have you thought about this, have you thought about that?’ He’s very good at sketching out the big picture of a cool idea and then starting people charging off down it.”  Your biography on the TruSecure website says your company provided key information to the US Department of Justice about David Smith, the writer of the Melissa virus. “Two days after the FBI called, we gave them 200 documents with personal information. On the FBI website, you’ll find them thanking us for finding and helping prosecute Smith. He pled guilty to in excess of $80 million of damage.” Dr. Tippett calls the work “computer forensics.” Combing through masses of accumulated information, TruSecure can generate clues such as what state a hacker may live in, whether the person has pets, what his or her hobbies are. In David Smith’s case, TruSecure was able to produce what Internet service provider he used in New Jersey. Such work may sound exciting, but Dr. Tippett doesn’t play detective himself. “It bores me stiff. Mostly what people talk about on the Internet is drivel. It’s like listening to teenage kids talking on the telephone.” I’m curious: Why were you at the White House? “Just meeting with the computer security czar, Howard Schmidt [former vice-chair of the president’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board]. He’s worried about what government can do to make [cyberspace] safer, or lead the charge for the rest of the country. But they’re following traditional Earth-is-flat thinking. They’re telling people every time there’s a new vulnerability, go fix it,” he says. “I get involved in things down there too often. Last time, they called me and four other security experts. They said, ‘Whenever you guys put out alerts about viruses, you’re almost always right. Whenever we put out alerts, we’re pretty much always wrong.’ We spent a day talking about how we get it right. In our case, it’s models and interactions.” Dr. Tippett, married for fifteen years and the father of two, travels often but still finds time for family, skiing, biking, a little TV (The West Wing is a favorite), and flying planes, a lifelong passion. He flew at the earliest age allowed: lessons at fifteen, soloing at sixteen, becoming a private pilot at seventeen, and adding a commercial license to his collection at eighteen. He painted houses to pay for the lessons, then taught flying and worked as an engineer at a Top-40 radio station to pay for college. He sometimes pilots one of his own planes for business trips: a six-seater Beech Baron or an eight-seater Piper Cheyenne propeller jet. All that and a visionary too, if you ask TruSecure’s Mr. Bales. “He’s the classic overachiever,” he says. “He has a Ph.D. He’s a pilot. He’s a doctor, but just being a doctor isn’t enough for Peter; he’s an emergency-room doctor. He’s that he-won’t-be-happy-unless-he’s-going-Mach-2-with-his-hair-on-fire kind of guy.”  Jolie Lewis (CWR ’94) is a longtime contributor to Case Magazine. She is a graduate student in the creative writing program at the Ohio State University. Photography by Nathan Lankford |
TruSecure has its points of intrigue, too. Among them is the mole operation that tracks the cyberspace movements of thousands of hackers. It was his company that helped lead federal investigators to the writers of the 
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