Because of what I do, I have to deal with media quite often. Usually, we have an excellent relationship: I help the journalists dig out the facts, figures, research and opinions for their articles, they help me by promoting good security practices with their target audience, and by mentioning my company, which, I believe, does an excellent job in stopping modern threats. This has lead to a number of good quotes in well-known media like Times, Daily Mail, Independent, Guardian, BBC News, Washington Post, PC World, VNUNet, ComputerWorld, ZDNet, Wired and many others. It has also lead to BBC3 and TV5 videos, some podcasts, etc. The bottom line is that generally, it is a pleasure working with journalists together, finding new angles to look at the work I, my team and my company do every day. I had my good share of good, well-formed and correct quotes.

But statistically, it should level out somehow, right? As the majority, if not all, of previous quotes were positive, with good messages, it was only a matter of time before misquoting or taking a quote out of context were to happen. I was not amazed, but rather quite disappointed that it happened with Metro today.

Apparently, I appear in a piece where online cyber-criminals are depicted as almost heros and the security industry – as a bunch of know-nothings. I feel that not only my words were taken out of context and altered beyond recognition in a way which puts a whole different meaning to them, but also that the Metro target audience (which would be your normal usual people taking buses or underground to work and back, possibly knowing little about computer security) was let down and misled by this “article”.

It just happens that some journalists find it amusing to either intentionally or unintentionally misquote people they interview, hunting for yet another sensation, putting a spin on words, and fighting for the front pages. Those journalists are quite different from the people I normally work with – people who are after long-term relationships and after maintaining journalism (the second oldest profession, mind you) as a respectful job. Although we are trained to deal with tricky situations during interviews and we normally have safeguards against them, sometimes sh*t happens. I’m just sad that it happened in such a way that reached such a large audience.

I’m not alone in having been misquoted both in secuirty field and outside. In fact, I don’t know a single public speaker that hasn’t experienced that.

Fortunately, all of the people that matter the most to me – my friends, my colleagues in the company and outside, my family – simply did not see me in those quotes. A lot of them came back to me saying “I am absolutely confident that what is printed is not what you said”.

Then again, quoting Brendan Behan: “There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary”.