McAfee
Encyclopedia
McAfee, Inc. is a computer security
Computer security
Computer security is a branch of computer technology known as information security as applied to computers and networks. The objective of computer security includes protection of information and property from theft, corruption, or natural disaster, while allowing the information and property to...

 company headquartered in Santa Clara, California
Santa Clara, California
Santa Clara , founded in 1777 and incorporated in 1852, is a city in Santa Clara County, in the U.S. state of California. The city is the site of the eighth of 21 California missions, Mission Santa Clara de Asís, and was named after the mission. The Mission and Mission Gardens are located on the...

, USA. It markets software and services to home users, businesses and the public sector. On August 19, 2010, electronics company Intel
Intel Corporation
Intel Corporation is an American multinational semiconductor chip maker corporation headquartered in Santa Clara, California, United States and the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue. It is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most...

 agreed to purchase McAfee for $7.68 billion (£5 billion). The acquisition closed on February 28, 2011.

History

The company was founded in 1989 as McAfee Associates, named for its founder John McAfee
John McAfee
John McAfee is a computer programmer and founder of McAfee. He was one of the first people to design anti-virus software and to develop a virus scanner. He was born in England and raised in Salem, Virginia...

. McAfee was incorporated in the state of Delaware in 1992. Network Associates was formed in 1997 as a merger of McAfee Associates and Network General. In 2004, a major restructuring
Restructuring
Restructuring is the corporate management term for the act of reorganizing the legal, ownership, operational, or other structures of a company for the purpose of making it more profitable, or better organized for its present needs...

 occurred. In the spring, the company sold its Magic Solutions
Magic Solutions, Inc.
Magic Solutions International, Inc. was a company specializing in help desk automation and asset management software. It started as an unplanned spin-off from a computer system integrator. Based on the east coast of the United States, it became one of east coast's most successful independent...

 business to Remedy, a subsidiary of BMC Software
BMC Software
BMC Software, Inc. is a multinational corporation specializing in Business Service Management software, with record annual revenue in fiscal 2009 of $1.87 billion...

. In the summer of 2004, the company sold the Sniffer Technologies business to a venture capital backed firm named 'Network General
Network General
NetScout Systems, Inc. is a provider of integrated network performance management solutions. NetScout is known for their packet Sniffer and nGenius packet flow recorder products. It is headquartered in Westford, Massachusetts and has approximately 800 employees in offices across the globe...

' - the same name as the original owner of Sniffer Technologies. Also, the company changed its name back to McAfee to reflect its focus on security-related technologies.

Among other companies bought and sold by McAfee (formerly known as Network Associates) is Trusted Information Systems
Trusted Information Systems
Trusted Information Systems was a computer security research and development company during the 1980s and 1990s, performing computer and communications security research for organizations such as NSA, DARPA, ARL, AFRL, SPAWAR, and others.TIS was founded in 1983 by NSA veteran Steve Walker, and at...

, which developed the Firewall Toolkit, which was the free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 foundation for the commercial Gauntlet Firewall, which was later sold by McAfee to Secure Computing Corporation. Network Associates, 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
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 software, as that organization produced portions of the Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

, FreeBSD
FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via BSD UNIX. Although for legal reasons FreeBSD cannot be called “UNIX”, as the direct descendant of BSD UNIX , FreeBSD’s internals and system APIs are UNIX-compliant...

, and Darwin
Darwin (operating system)
Darwin is an open source POSIX-compliant computer operating system released by Apple Inc. in 2000. It is composed of code developed by Apple, as well as code derived from NeXTSTEP, BSD, and other free software projects....

 operating systems, and developed portions of the BIND
BIND
BIND , or named , is the most widely used DNS software on the Internet.On Unix-like operating systems it is the de facto standard.Originally written by four graduate students at the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley , the name originates as an acronym from...

 name server software and SNMP
Simple Network Management Protocol
Simple Network Management Protocol is an "Internet-standard protocol for managing devices on IP networks. Devices that typically support SNMP include routers, switches, servers, workstations, printers, modem racks, and more." It is used mostly in network management systems to monitor...

 version 3.

Leading up to the TIS Labs acquisition, McAfee had acquired Calgary
Calgary
Calgary is a city in the Province of Alberta, Canada. It is located in the south of the province, in an area of foothills and prairie, approximately east of the front ranges of the Canadian Rockies...

, Alberta
Alberta
Alberta is a province of Canada. It had an estimated population of 3.7 million in 2010 making it the most populous of Canada's three prairie provinces...

, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

-based FSA Corporation
FSA Corporation
FSA Corporation developed UNIX and Windows system level software for security and distributed system administration in the 1990s...

, 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
Public key infrastructure
Public Key Infrastructure is a set of hardware, software, people, policies, and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store, and revoke digital certificates. In cryptography, a PKI is an arrangement that binds public keys with respective user identities by means of a certificate...

 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
BeyondTrust
BeyondTrust is an American company that develops, markets, and supports a family of access control products for UNIX and Windows operating systems. The organization is one of the 500 largest software companies in the world...

), the growth of antivirus ware always outpaced the growth of the other security product lines. It is fair to say that the company remains best known for its antivirus and antispam product lines.

On June 9, 1998 Network Associates agreed to acquire Dr Solomon's Group PLC
Dr Solomon's Antivirus
Dr Solomon's Antivirus Toolkit was an antivirus suite which incorporated prevention, detection and repair for Microsoft Windows , Novell, SCO Unix, Sun Solaris and OS/2.-History:...

, the leading European manufacturer of antivirus software, for $642 million in stock.

On April 2, 2003, McAfee acquired IntruVert Networks for $100 million. According to Network World, "IntruVert's technology focus is on intrusion-prevention, which entails not just detecting attacks, but blocking them. The IntruVert product line can be used as a passive intrusion-detection system, just watching and reporting, or it can be used in the intrusion-prevention mode of blocking a perceived attack."

On January 4, 2006, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed suit against McAfee for overstating its 1998–2000 net revenue by $622 million. Without admitting any wrongdoing, McAfee simultaneously settled the complaint, and agreed to pay a $50 million penalty and rework its accounting practices.

On April 5, 2006, McAfee bought out SiteAdvisor for a reputed $70 million in competition with Symantec, a service that warns users if downloading software or filling out forms on a site may obtain malware or spam. In January 2006, McAfee agreed to pay a fine of US$50 million to the SEC
United States Securities and Exchange Commission
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is a federal agency which holds primary responsibility for enforcing the federal securities laws and regulating the securities industry, the nation's stock and options exchanges, and other electronic securities markets in the United States...

 for accounting fraud known as channel stuffing
Channel stuffing
Channel stuffing is the business practice where a company, or a sales force within a company, inflates its sales figures by forcing more products through a distribution channel than the channel is capable of selling to the world at large. Also known as "trade loading", this can be the result of a...

 that served to inflate their revenue to their investors.

In October 2006 McAfee fired their president Kevin Weiss, and their CEO George Samaneuk resigned under the cloud of a recent SEC investigation which also caused the departure of Kent Roberts, the General Counsel
General Counsel
A general counsel is the chief lawyer of a legal department, usually in a corporation or government department. The term is most used in the United States...

, 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.

In January 2007 under pressure from ex-employees world wide, several of which backed a class action in the United States, McAfee agreed to honor share options granted, but which are unable to be exercised due to the self-imposed blackout on employee options dealing.

On November 19, 2007, McAfee agreed to purchase SafeBoot for $350 million. SafeBoot was at the time one of the leading providers of encryption software to protect information stored on laptops, PDA
PDA
A PDA is most commonly a Personal digital assistant, also known as a Personal data assistant, a mobile electronic device.PDA may also refer to:In science, medicine and technology:...

's, etc. from exposure if the device was lost.

On September 22, 2008, McAfee announced its intention to acquire Secure Computing
Secure Computing
Secure Computing Corporation, or SCC, was a public company that developed and sold computer security appliances and hosted services to protect users and data...

. The combined company will form the world's largest dedicated security company.

On March 17, 2010, McAfee launched Cloud Secure program, a new service for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers to add additional security to their cloud deployments.The new program includes cloud security certification services that are provided on an annual basis and will include existing security controls, processes and certifications, as well as future cloud security standards; and automatic and daily security audits, remediation of vulnerabilities and reporting of the security status of their service and network using the McAfee Cloud Secure service.

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
Svchost.exe
In the Windows NT family of operating systems, svchost.exe is a system process which hosts multiple Windows services. Its executable image, %SystemRoot%\System32\Svchost.exe or %SystemRoot%\SysWOW64\Svchost.exe runs in multiple instances, each hosting one or more services...

) 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 behemoth Coles reported that 10 percent (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.

On August 19, 2010, Intel
Intel Corporation
Intel Corporation is an American multinational semiconductor chip maker corporation headquartered in Santa Clara, California, United States and the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue. It is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most...

 announced that it would buy McAfee for $48 a share in a deal valued at $7.68 billion.

Naming rights

McAfee formerly had naming rights to the then-named McAfee Coliseum, home of the Oakland Athletics
Oakland Athletics
The Oakland Athletics are a Major League Baseball team based in Oakland, California. The Athletics are a member of the Western Division of Major League Baseball's American League. From to the present, the Athletics have played in the O.co Coliseum....

 baseball team in Oakland, California
Oakland, California
Oakland is a major West Coast port city on San Francisco Bay in the U.S. state of California. It is the eighth-largest city in the state with a 2010 population of 390,724...

 from 2004–2008.

Mergers and Acquisitions

Sentrigo
Sentrigo
Sentrigo was a privately-held software company located in Santa Clara, California, USA, until its acquisition in April, 2011 by McAfee.The company was founded in 2006 by Nathan Shuchami and Slavik Markovich, to address several key challenges in Database security...

 Acquisition
On March 23, 2011, McAfee announced its intention to acquire privately owned Sentrigo
Sentrigo
Sentrigo was a privately-held software company located in Santa Clara, California, USA, until its acquisition in April, 2011 by McAfee.The company was founded in 2006 by Nathan Shuchami and Slavik Markovich, to address several key challenges in Database security...

, a leading provider of database security, including vulnerability management, database activity monitoring, database audit, and virtual patching — which ensure databases are protected without impacting performance or availability. The acquisition enables McAfee to extend its database security portfolio and deliver comprehensive, industry-leading solutions to serve the rapidly growing database security market, estimated to reach more than $600 million by 2012. The acquisition closed on April 6, 2011.


tenCube Acquisition
On July 29, 2010, McAfee announced a definitive agreement to acquire tenCube, a privately-held online security company that specialized in anti-theft and data security for mobile devices. The acquisition allowed McAfee to complete its diversification into the mobile security space, and announce its plans to build the next generation mobile platform. The acquisition closed on August 25, 2010.


Trust Digital Acquisition
On May 25, 2010, McAfee announced a definitive agreement to acquire Trust Digital, a privately-held online security company that specialized in security for mobile devices. The acquisition allowed McAfee to extend its services beyond traditional endpoint security and move into the mobile security market. The acquisition closed on June 3, 2010. The price for Trust Digital was not disclosed


MX Logic Acquisition
On July 30, 2009, McAfee announced plans to acquire managed email and web security vendor MX Logic. The acquisition provided an enhanced range of SaaS-based security services such as cloud-based intelligence, web security, email security, endpoint security and vulnerability assessment. The deal closed on September 1, 2009 at a price of $140 million. MX Logic staff has been integrated into McAfee's SaaS business unit.


Solidcore Systems Acquisition
On May 15, 2009, McAfee announced its intention acquire Solidcore Systems
Solidcore Systems
Solidcore Systems, Inc. was a software company based in Cupertino, California, that developed software to detect and prevent unwanted change. It was acquired by Mcafee in June 2009....

, a privately-held security company, for $33 million. Solidcore was a maker of software that helped companies protect ATMs and other specialized computers. The acquisition integrated Solidcore's whitelisting and compliance enforcement mechanisms into the McAfee product line. The deal closed on June 1, 2009.


Endeavor Acquisition
In January 2009, McAfee announced plans to acquire Endeavor Security, a privately-held maker of IPS/IDS technology. The deal closed in February 2009 for a total purchase price of $3.2 million.


Secure Computing Acquisition
On September 22, 2008, McAfee announced an agreement to acquire Secure Computing
Secure Computing
Secure Computing Corporation, or SCC, was a public company that developed and sold computer security appliances and hosted services to protect users and data...

, a company specializing in network security hardware, services, and software products. The acquisition expanded McAfee's business in securing networks and cloud computing services to offer a more comprehensive brand of products. The deal closed on November 19, 2008 at a price of $497 million.


Reconnex Acquisition
On July 31, 2008, McAfee announced it would acquire Reconnex, a maker of data protection appliances and software. Reconnex sold data loss prevention software, designed to prevent sensitive documents and data from leaving corporate networks. The acquisition added content awareness to McAfee's data security portfolio. The $46 million deal closed on August 12, 2008.


ScanAlert Acquisition
On October 30, 2007, McAfee announced plans to acquire ScanAlert for $51 million. The acquisition integrated ScanAlert's Hacker Safe service and McAfee's SiteAdvisor rating system to attack website security from both sides. It was the industry's first service to help consumers stay safe as they searched, surfed and shopped. The deal closed on February 7, 2008.


SafeBoot Holding B.V. Acquisition
On October 8, 2007, McAfee announced it would acquire SafeBoot Holding B.V. for $350 million. SafeBoot provided mobile data security solutions that protected data, devices, and networks against the risk associated with loss, theft, and unauthorized access. Through the acquisition, McAfee became the only vendor to deliver endpoint, network, web, email and data security, as well as risk and compliance solutions. Gerhard Watzinger, CEO of SafeBoot, joined McAfee to lead the Data Protection product business unit. The deal closed on November 19, 2007.


Onigma Ltd Acquisition
On October 16, 2006, McAfee announced it would acquire Israel based Onigma Ltd for $20 million. Onigma provides host-based data leakage protection software that prevents intentional and unintentional leakage of sensitive data by internal users.

External links

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