McAfee sues ship-jumping sales staff over trade secret theft allegations

McAfee is suing former senior salespeople whom it alleges stole company trade secrets when they moved to a rival security vendor. Three former "highly compensated" sales staffers, named in court documents as Jennifer Kinney, Percy Tejeda and Alan Coe, are said to have moved to rival antivirus endpoint security company Tanium …

[iron]

McAffee's secret sales tactics? Let me guess...

#1 Don't admit the product is total shite

#2 Don't admit other similar systems exist

#3 Don't admit the product is total shite

[Steve Davies 3]

And Number 4

Don't sue your former employees as Nos 1, 2 & 3 will get exposed in court for all to see and jeer at.

Google 'doing a Ratner' and you will see the result.

HP is in danger of doing this in the Autonomy trial.

[Electronics'R'Us]

Oh the Irony

A well-known antivirus security solutions firm does not implement USB access controls

[TonyJ]

Re: Oh the Irony

"...A well-known antivirus security solutions firm does not implement USB access controls..."

Came to say exactly this...not my area of expertise but I assume their own software is supposed to be able to handle this very thing??

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Oh the Irony

McAfee is lucky if it runs for five minutes without either (1) crashing, or (2) hogging 150% of the system resources.

And now you want it to *do* something?

[Trollslayer]

Re: Oh the Irony

That is against a virus, not someone copying files from the PC.

[Youngone]

Re: Oh the Irony

"...A well-known antivirus security solutions firm does not implement USB access controls..."

And has staff earning a 6 figure salary who sends possibly incriminating evidence using their work email.

[Captain Scarlet]

Re: Oh the Irony

Yeah McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator had options to restrict the use of USB in the AV client.

This was over 10 years ago as well, its one of the few bits of McAfee software at the time I didn't actually have any issues with (Policy setup was very easy, it very easy to setup specific servers to distribute anti virus signatures and updates, always wondered at the time why the consumer versions of their AV were so bloated and how McAfee could suddenly claim we needed a new module to increase the cost by 25% each year)

[701arvn]

Re: Oh the Irony

Because they have configured DLP to allow the file transfer whilst logging it.

They may be rethinking that approach.

[Robert Helpmann??]

Re: Oh the Irony

A well-known...security solutions firm does not implement USB access controls

You beat me to it. They have a product - McAfee Total Protection for Data Loss Prevention (DLP) - that is supposed to address this very issue. Of course, the ex-employees might have known how to disable or otherwise circumvent the protections in place. it's harder to get around logging, though, which is what I think is playing out in the court case. Too bad there wasn't a SIEM solution in place that would have caught the tools being disabled, if that is actually what happened. Monitoring is only as good as the response it generates.

[adam payne]

intimate knowledge of the ‘secret sauce’ underlying McAfee’s sales tactics and customer strategies,

The secret sauce of not admitting the product is crap, makes your machine crawl and has a hard time detecting anything.

Don't even get me started on EPO *shudder*

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on my experience so far, Tanium is dead set on following in McAfee's footsteps.

[SNAFUology]

Ship-jumping

I just wanted to say - it is reminiscent of McAfee himself sounds like something HE would do.

[Korev]

Re: Ship-jumping

Like the wonderful how to uninstall McAfee antivirus video a few years ago.

I'm in the office so am not going to search and link to it!

[big_D]

well-known antivirus security solutions firm

Shouldn't that be notorious?

[manalive]

McCrappy

Worst software ever, ePO is a horrible horrible piece of junk.

Thankfully, we’ve just signed with another provider who I know through experience are miles better than McAfee, which I consider to be a virus in its own right.

I’ve lost count of the amount of times DLP corrupts and there’s absolutely no solution other than to completely flatten and rebuild the machine. Good riddance.

[steviebuk]

Bit ironic?

That it suggests they hadn't/haven't locked down their own network and systems. So they didn't have Google Drive and other cloud storage sources blocked by default? And they didn't have e-mail interrogation software to check what was being sent (which should of then blocked that .xlsx document going out).

Oh dear.

Cases like this also confuse me. "We're hiring you as sales. When/if you leave you can't take any knowledge of sales techniques you've learnt over the years while with us. So essentially you can't make any carrier progress as all you've learnt is void if you go elsewhere. So essentially if/when you leave, you just have to get a job in a totally different field." How is that lawful.

Lets hope the case exposes how shit McAfee actually is.

[Roland6]

Re: Bit ironic?

>That it suggests they hadn't/haven't locked down their own network and systems. ...

Don't see an issue here, I suspect the vast majority of businesses don't have things locked down as tight as you seem to want, because it gets in the way and fundamentally at some point you have to trust your staff, particularly your senior staff who's actions (or inaction) will have a massive impact on the bottom line).

> When/if you leave you can't take any knowledge of sales techniques you've learnt over the years while with us.

Not quite; knowledge is held in the head and goes with you, everything else ie. stuff you put in the bag/memory stick is legally the property of the employer and should be left behind...