Thoughts on McAfee

MitM

I was wondering everyone's thoughts on McAfee as a security company. I haven't paid attention to mcafee for many years, ever since my company stopped using them for endpoint protection. We were never really satisfied with the product. I was a very surprised to see them as leaders in the IPS, CASB and SIEM space

Anyone using any of their products?

vCISO2017

Hi,
They are leaders because in a number of cases they bought the leaders. For example they bought Skyhigh which is considered the leading industry CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker) which we use for O365 DLP and Shadow IT.

yoba222

Considering that Intel bought them a few years back and then spit them back out again like a year or two ago, I'd say mediocre at best. vCISO2017's post reminds me of a recent story mentioning how Microsoft is decorating their campus/HQ/whatever in a Minecraft theme, as if Microsoft invented Minecraft and didn't simply buy it.

WafflesAndRootbeer

I use their products at home and have no issues with them apart from the usual poor tech support and they had serious issues with Windows 10, though I believe those issues might actually be more attributable to Intel's own drivers and software being very buggy, which is still an issue to this day. I used to love McAfee software back in the day and all the local ISPs and schools are pushing it through their channels to end-users, so I guess it can't really be that bad. I grew up using their stuff and I suppose they were better back in the 90's, but these days, I think everyone pretty much sucks as far as security software goes and most of the problems really seem to be related to poor practices and third-party software that interferes with one thing or another.

MitM

thanks for the replies everyone

@vCISO2017, how do you like Skyhigh?

laughlin

I use McAfee Antivirus for my personal laptop. I find it quite efficient. I used the trial version first, then tried Avast before purchasing an annual protection plan from McAfee. I'd say 7/10 from my experience so far.

paul78

We deployed McAfee endpoint protection for about 1500 endpoints earlier this year. The ePO is pretty nice but it's very clunky interface and a terrible design. Generally speaking we had a very high failure rate in the deployment where the agents would not fully deploy. And for Mac endpoints, we ended up de-installing McAfee and we are looking for another solution.

McAfee is generally a leader in areas where they acquired a company as @vCISO2017 said. In the SIEM space - they acquired Nitro Security a bunch of years back.

paul78

Skyliinez92 wrote: »

This guy made McAfee...

John McAfee resigned from McAfee in 1994. He doesn't have anything to do with the company. I don't believe that he even owns any stock in the company in 20 years. I often found it interesting that they haven't changed the name given some of McAfee's antics other than for a short time when it was called Intel Security.

DatabaseHead

Did you see the documentary on Netflix?

alan2308

Skyliinez92 wrote: »

This guy made McAfee... I don't trust him with my PC security...

For some reason, I do. Too bad he's no longer in the business.

UnixGuy

I have heard nothing but complaints about their products: McAfee ePO, DLP, HIPS,... but I personally have no experience with them so who knows

MitM

Skyliinez92 wrote: »

I would never consider using their product over another AV like Symantec or AVG. They are p*ss poor and their founder looks like a homeless man.

Yes, I would not use their AV over my current solution. I would consider for CASB if the product they acquired was really that good

scaredoftests

Still a resource hog..

Triggerious

McAfee ENS is a lot better technology. Agree to some extent that it can be a bit clunky. From what I’ve seen and talked about with folks at a recent con, there’s also some unwillingness to learn it and dedicate time to it. I’m not saying it’s the best, but I’ve come from multiple large environments (up to 40,000), and it’s been very successful. There are multiple layers and I like their constant focus on an all in one product.  Think about it from a multi-vendor perspective where you’d have to have x number of clients on an end user machine. I like that I’m dealing with one Agent that interfaces with everything else.  I’m looking forward to their Cloud hosted EPO as it eliminates the local requirements on site. 

Also, though, with all that being said, what do you need?  McAfee has, in my opinion, too many options sometimes for a smaller organization where another vendor can do the basics.

At the end of the day, no single product will do everything perfectly. And for me, where I’m at, we don’t get sales calls constantly because we work on vendor relationships where we may discuss options, but we’re not getting bombarded with sales pitches around every corner.