McAfee, Inc. (; known as Intel Security Group in 2014-2017) is an American global computer security software company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and, it says, the world's largest dedicated security technology company.
The company was a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel from February 2011, during which time it was part of the Intel Security division. In April 2017, Intel announced that it had returned McAfee to a standalone company.
On September 7, 2016, Intel announced a strategic deal with TPG Capital to convert Intel Security into a joint venture between Intel and TPG Capital called McAfee. That deal closed on April 3, 2017. Thoma Bravo took a minority stake in the new company, and Intel maintains a 49% stake.
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History
Early years
The company was founded in 1987 as McAfee Associates, named for its founder John McAfee, who resigned from the company in 1994. McAfee was incorporated in the state of Delaware in 1992. Network Associates was formed in 1997 as a merger of McAfee Associates, Network General, PGP Corporation and Helix Software.
The company restructured in 2004, beginning with the sale of its Magic Solutions business to Remedy, a subsidiary of BMC Software early in the year. In mid-2004, the company sold the Sniffer Technologies business to a venture capital backed firm named Network General (the same name as the original owner of Sniffer Technologies), and changed its name back to McAfee to reflect its focus on security-related technologies.
Open source
Among other companies bought and sold by McAfee is Trusted Information Systems, which developed the Firewall Toolkit, the free software foundation for the commercial Gauntlet Firewall, which was later sold to Secure Computing Corporation.
McAfee, as a result of brief ownership of TIS Labs/NAI Labs/Network Associates Laboratories/McAfee Research, was highly influential in the world of Open Source software, as that organization produced portions of the Linux, FreeBSD, and Darwin operating systems, and developed portions of the BIND name server software and SNMP version 3.
Encryption technologies
McAfee had acquired Calgary, Alberta, Canada-based FSA Corporation, which helped the company diversify its security offerings away from just client-based antivirus software by bringing on board its own network and desktop encryption technologies.
The FSA team also oversaw the creation of a number of other technologies that were leading edge at the time, including firewall, file encryption, and public key infrastructure product lines. While those product lines had their own individual successes including PowerBroker (written by Dean Huxley and Dan Freedman and now sold by BeyondTrust), the growth of antivirus ware always outpaced the growth of the other security product lines. It is fair to say that McAfee remains best known for its anti-virus and anti-spam products.
Acquisition by Intel
On August 19, 2010, Intel announced that it would purchase McAfee for $48 a share in a deal valued at $7.68 billion.
On January 6, 2014, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced during the Consumer Electronics Show the name change from McAfee Security to Intel Security. The company's red shield logo would remain, with the firm continuing to operate as a wholly owned Intel subsidiary. John McAfee, who no longer has any involvement in the company, expressed his pleasure at his name no longer being associated with the software. "I am now everlastingly grateful to Intel for freeing me from this terrible association with the worst software on the planet. These are not my words, but the words of millions of irate users." However, as of 2016 the products still bear the name McAfee.
The company was spun back out of Intel on April 4, 2017.
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Products
McAfee primarily develops digital-security tools for personal computers and server devices, and more recently, for mobile devices.
McAfee brands, products and sub-products include:
- IntruShield
- McAfee Anti-Malware Engine Core (code-name: AMCore)
- McAfee Change Control
- McAfee DAT Reputation (datreputation)
- McAfee E-Business Server
- McAfee Entercept
- McAfee SiteAdvisor
- McAfee VirusScan
- Validate
Acquisitions
Controversies
- On January 4, 2006, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed suit against McAfee for overstating its 1998-2000 net revenue by US$622,000,000. Without admitting any wrongdoing, McAfee simultaneously settled the complaint, and agreed to pay a $50 million penalty and rework its accounting practices. The fine was for accounting fraud; known as channel stuffing that served to inflate their revenue to their investors.
- In October 2006, McAfee fired its president Kevin Weiss, and its CEO George Samaneuk resigned under the cloud of a recent SEC investigation which also caused the departure of Kent Roberts, the General Counsel, earlier in the year. In late December 2006 both Weiss and Samaneuk had share option grant prices revised upwards by McAfee's board. Weiss and Roberts were both exonerated of all wrongdoing from the claims of McAfee in 2009.
- On April 21, 2010, beginning at approximately 14:00 UTC, millions of computers worldwide running Windows XP Service Pack 3 were affected by an erroneous virus definition file update by McAfee, resulting in the removal of a Windows system file (svchost.exe) on those machines, causing machines to lose network access and, in some cases, enter a reboot loop. McAfee rectified this by removing and replacing the faulty DAT file, version 5958, with an emergency DAT file, version 5959 and has posted a fix for the affected machines in their consumer knowledge base. The University of Michigan's medical school reported that 8,000 of its 25,000 computers crashed. Police in Lexington, Ky., resorted to hand-writing reports and turned off their patrol car terminals as a precaution. Some jails canceled visitation, and Rhode Island hospitals turned away non-trauma patients at emergency rooms and postponed some elective surgeries. Australian supermarket Coles reported that 10% (1,100) of its point-of-sales terminals were affected and was forced to shut down stores in both western and southern parts of the country. As a result of the outage, McAfee implemented additional QA protocols for any releases that directly impacted critical system files. The company also rolled out additional capabilities in Artemis that provide another level of protection against false positives by leveraging a whitelist of hands-off system files.
- In August 2012, an issue with an update to McAfee antivirus for home and enterprise computers turned off the antivirus protection and, in many cases, prevented connection to the Internet. McAfee was criticized for being slow to address the problem, forcing network operations to spend time diagnosing the issue.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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