A working life: The computer virus expert
The open-plan office in which I'm standing is buzzing, because a new type of threat has emerged in the past 24 hours. Excited young men and women (though mostly men) chatter beneath wall-mounted TV screens showing maps of the world overlaid with pulsing dots and scrolling information – the world's major cyber-security threats in real time.
I'm in a humdrum business park a mile or two outside Dublin city centre (not the first place you would think of when visualising cyber-crime detectives playing hi-tech cat and mouse games with criminal masterminds) to meet Patrick Fitzgerald and the team at computer security experts Symantec.
Dublin's own Silicon Valley has long been home to the likes of AOL, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and IBM. Symantec fits in nicely as the parent company of software protection specialist Norton.
