mcafee

Credit John Thompson for having impeccable timing. Of course, the timing of his resignation announcement as chief executive officer from Symantec was purely coincidental, falling just one day before Microsoft dropped an A-bomb on the antivirus security market. But better lucky than good.

Microsoft's move to kill its Windows Live OneCare PC care and security suite and replace it with free consumer anti-malware software is a big deal for the likes of Symantec, McAfee, and the other antivirus suppliers (though nobody's going to say that on the record). Competing against free is always a tough sell, and this … Read more

Microsoft's decision to offer free antivirus software puts rivals such as McAfee and Symantec in a tough position.

To be sure, those two--and other rivals--will be able to tout products that offer a broader range of features than Microsoft plans to deliver with "Morro" next year. At the same time, "nada" is a tough price to compete against.

That raises the question of whether those companies or others may look to antitrust regulators for help. We've put queries into those companies and also posed the antitrust question to Microsoft. I'll let you know … Read more

UPDATED: Corrected the information that McAfee provides software security solution for Dell's self-encrypting PCs as previously suggested in the article.

According to credible sources, a notebook computer is stolen every 53 seconds--and 97 percent are never recovered. In most cases, the risk of losing data stored on the hard drive is much higher than the value of the notebook itself.

To address this issue, Seagate, Dell, and McAfee teamed up to announce on Monday data encryption solutions for PCs that work without you even having to know about it. The solutions include new self-encrypting hard drives, software managing systems, and computers that implements the two.

The new hard drives belong to the Seagate's Momentus FDE family. FDE stands for full-disk encryption, Seagate's self-encrypting method for 2.5-inch hard drives.

Dell is the PC vendor that implements the new hard drives in a variety of its business computers.

McAfee annouced that it has joined the list of security software providers that support Seagate hard drives' embedded hardware encryption. This offers customers another choice of enterprise management solutions required to secure notebook computers.

The new Momentus FDE notebook hard drives comes in two performance grades: one that spins at 5400rpm and the other at 7200rpm. Both are presently available in 320GB and 16GB storage capacities, with 500GB versions coming early next year. However, the 5400rpm Momentus FDE has only 8MB of cache as opposed to 16MB of the 7200rpm version.

These drives features SATA controller interface and built-in AES encryption, a government-grade encryption capable of encrypting a hard drive's entire content transparently and automatically. … Read more

A former marketing manager at McAfee has been arrested on charges that she directed more than $3.8 million of McAfee business to companies that she and her husband own.

Susan Despinic, 35, and Aurawm Almaneih, 37, posted $1 million and $500,000 bail, respectively, and were released after their arrest Thursday on grand theft charges.

At least one of the companies that made money off McAfee was a "shell" company created for that sole purpose, according to the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office.

The Los Gatos couple faces up to seven years in prison.

Despinic, … Read more

The Web site Dictionary.com defines the word focus as "a central point, as of attraction, attention, or activity." This is an apt description of McAfee's inaugural customer event, McAfee Focus.

McAfee customers received the message that the company is focused in three areas:

Growth through acquisition. McAfee is intent on becoming a one-stop shop for governance, compliance, and risk management. To this end, the company purchased outside firms like Reconnex, SafeBoot, and Secure Computing. Look for McAfee to continue this trend by buying companies in areas like application security, identity management, IT operations management, and security … Read more

I recently blogged about people in Japan getting new Eee Box PCs that came with a virus on their hard drives. Now, the opposite: a new thumb drive that comes with antivirus software.

SanDisk, a maker of USB flash drives, and security giant McAfee, teamed up Tuesday to announce the SanDisk Cruzer Enterprise. The USB thumb drive comes with antimalware protection from McAfee built in.

SanDisk's Cruzer Enterprise USB flash drives have been known for being thumb drives with mandatory security for corporate users. Now, in addition to preventing data leaks by utilizing advanced hardware-based 256-bit AES encryption and … Read more

If you think there are a lot of phishing scams cramming your e-mail in-box now, just wait--fraudsters have more tricks up their sleeve.

That's the message from McAfee Security Journal, due out Monday. Most of the articles deal with ways in which scammers use social engineering --not hacking--to dupe people into downloading malicious software to their computers or giving out their personal information, passwords, and bank account details to malicious Web sites.

One of the more interesting articles is titled "Vulnerabilities in the Equities Markets."

There have been headlines about people scamming the equities market by circulating … Read more

On Wednesday, HBGary announced that Andy Purdy has joined their advisory board.

Purdy, while a member of the White House, co-drafted the 2003 edition of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, then joined the Department of Homeland Security. There, he served on the tiger team that helped to form the National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) and the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT). He went to head both organizations and was dubbed by the media as the "cyberczar" of the United States until DHS appointed Greg Garcia as assistant secretary for cybersecurity and communications.

In 2006, Purdy … Read more

The former general counsel of computer security firm McAfee was acquitted on Friday of fraud charges relating to alleged stock options backdating.

Kent Roberts, indicted in February 2007, was found not guilty on two of three felony counts of fraud in San Francisco federal court. The jury, following a two-week trial, was hung on a third count of falsifying accounting records. A mistrial was declared and Roberts could be retried on that count.

Roberts was the first general counsel at a U.S. corporation to be criminally tried for alleged stock options backdating violations, his lawyer's office said.

"… Read more