Mcafee gets fierce about resellers (but in a good way)

To Marbella, for sun, sea and the McAfee EMEA partner summit. We saw little in way of breaking news from the conference: McAfee is squirrelling away the big announcements for its annual Focus security shindig in Las Vegas in October. And we have little to write about life at McAfee under Intel, which bought the company for $6 …

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe better products are needed?

Little wonder they are doing poorly in the SME area, in fact, I'm surprised they are still doing well at all considering how much their AV sucks, for example, 3rd bottom here:

http://www.matousec.com/projects/proactive-security-challenge/results.php

If businesses are really worried about data breaches, rather than spend loads of cash with McAfee maybe they should be looking to more security-centric staff training, decent sysadmins, and going for more secure OS/software/internal networking choices?

Where is the snake oil icon when you need it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Maybe better products are needed?

1) That test represents consumer Antivirus products not enterprise Antivirus products (which are architecturally different and only one piece of a large puzzle in combatting today's threat landscape)... not to mention it is both out of date and performed by a little-known tester that may have vested interest in the success of any number of the competitors (I see an advertisement from Symantec on the left bar for instance).

2) If you think AV is the answer for a "data breach", then you are in no position to be commenting on the quality of a company's AV products which represent a small part of best practices around breach prevention. Breaches are commonly from targeted or advanced malware attacks that require physical security, intrusion prevention, data loss prevention, email security, web gateway solutions, usb-device control, data classification/categorization exercises, vulnerability scanning, database security, system configuration audit and control, patch management, just to name a few of the ways today's businesses are trying to at least mitigate the looming breach challenges haunting the technology landscape. The fact is today's issues are mostly human in nature... blaming any company's antivirus technology for breaches is fundamentally inaccurate on a number of levels.

[Anonymous Coward]

McAfee. Not in my house

[jason 7]

Not a good advert really.

I would say of all the laptops and PCs I get in for virus cleaning 60% of them have McAfee running on them.

Does it really take a dozen McAfee services running in memory to protect my PC when MSSE does it with one?

[MarkDean]

Re: Not a good advert really.

1) Sounds like you are referring to consumer products rather than Enterprise products which would make this comment irrelevant in this enterprise channel focused thread (which was business, not technology focused by the way).

2) If 60% of systems run McAfee, then your statistic is in no way indicative of the quality of the product.

3) 90% of today's malware comes from the web so if they are just running memory-based AV that won't stop the issue. Tell your customer's to run a browser or network based web-security solution (i.e. McAfee Site Advisor which is free or a Web Gateway).

4) MSSE does not provide a smaller footprint in memory than McAfee, let alone any other AV solution (Symantec, Kaspersky, Sophos, etc). In fact MS is probably the last company that should be protecting the vulnerabilities that it for the most part creates... seems like a case of the wolf guarding the hen house.

[jason 7]

Re: Not a good advert really.

Some folks have funny ideas how current virus attacks work.

Basically no AV works to stop the daily written drive-bys that leave the AV companies 24 hours behind. I guess you could install EMET and turn DEP on for everything but thats a lot of work in the enterprise. Not too hard for the individual though.

The sites that get hacked to insert these attacks are usually those that are browsed by folks in their late 40's+ so cruise/holiday websites and financial investments. Not the kind of sites passed by too often in work possibly. But frequented by those all to keen to hand over their credit card details when something goes wrong.

Anyway if the fact that I get mostly infected PCs that have McAfee installed on it isn't exactly a great recommendation for it is it? Domestic or otherwise. One can assume that either McAfee is the most popular AV in which case it still isn't doing its job all that well, or it isn't that popular but is still not up to the task.

Crap software is still crap software whichever way you look at it. Next most useless appears to be Kaspersky followed by Avast then Norton.