McAfee sees no threat from free security tool

A SENIOR executive with McAfee, the largest dedicated security software firm, has said that Microsoft’s release this week of a suite of free security tools is unlikely to shake up the market.

“The free software is not the interesting thing; it’s how protected are you and how much global intelligence goes behind what you are putting on your PC,” said David Quantrell, president for McAfee in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “ So if your detection rates are 60 per cent but it’s free, I’m not sure how interesting that is versus 98 or 99 per cent.”

Mr Quantrell was in Ireland last week to announce a major expansion of McAfee’s European headquarters in Cork, which will recruit an additional 120 sales staff over the next six months.

Despite the recession, the security sector seems to be holding up well. This has benefited McAfee, which describes itself as a specialist in digital security, with solutions for customers ranging from home users to large corporations.

“I think our results are the best indication of that – 19 per cent growth last quarter and early 20s growth for the first part of the year,” says Mr Quantrell. “Overall I think we are seeing more opportunity than we can deal with – that’s why we are building out these kind of functions [in Cork]. I think cyber crime and security are front and centre for most companies.”

Although security vendors have been accused in the past of talking up the risks posed by shadowy hackers, the nature of computer crime has changed markedly in the last 10 years. Dr Alan Solomon, the high-profile computer scientist whose anti-virus company was acquired by McAfee in 1997, once said the reason there were no mainframe viruses was because there were no teenagers with mainframes in their garden sheds. But computer crime is no longer the exclusive domain of bored teenagers and now seems to be controlled by organised gangs.

“Sixty per cent of cybercrime now is financially motivated,” explains Mr Quantrell.

“At the end of the day now if you lose your personal data, it’s not just one person uses it, that data gets sold across the cybercrime network. You’ll find yourself again and again being taken for a ride.”

The key for companies like McAfee is to make sure they stay one step ahead of the criminals and have fixes for software vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.

The key resource for McAfee is its team of 100 researchers spread across five continents who are constantly evaluating new malware and viruses.

“We get millions of samples in a week and many of them are assessed automatically,” says Mr Quantrell. “We use manual assessment for very, very complex cases. It’s a real fine line between shutting things down automatically versus giving people enough intelligence about what’s going on so they can make a human decision.”

Many PCs are hacked so that they can be harnessed as part of “bot nets”, large networks of infected computers, which are used to flood websites with attacks – a tactic recently used against Facebook and Twitter.

“I think the challenge of the internet is that there is a level of control you can put in place and a level of control you don’t want,” says Mr Quantrell.