I recently came across an interesting article that struck a cord with me on many different levels. In the story, “McAfee CEO stresses mobility at T.O. event,” I once again agree with a number of points Dave DeWalt made at a partner summit in Toronto, with one big exception.
First, I couldn’t agree more with his general outlook:
- Mobile devices are the wave of the future
- Microsoft is not going to be the end-all, be-all dominant player in the corporate environment
- Whitelisting and blacklisting in combination is the way the security world is going
- Blacklisting is moving to the cloud rather than directly on every single device Continue reading this post…
It’s really puzzling to me to think about how today’s IT security professionals are trying to stop cyber threats. I mean, why go through the trouble of detecting 60,000 newly discovered threats each day, not to mention endure the performance impact that scanning has on a system, when you can quickly and automatically identify the few dozen applications that you would like to run on your endpoint computers?
In this week’s release of the McAfee Threats Report: Third Quarter 2010, the security software maker claims that malware reached an all-time high, averaging 60,000 new threats each day in the third quarter. That number has nearly quadrupled since 2007. Continue reading this post…
In my previous post, I talked about my personal crusade to update security and operational professionals about application whitelisting. Part of that mission is to dispel some of the misconceptions about application whitelisting that people are spreading across the Internet, and shed some light on how application whitelisting is now a widely accepted security and operational solution that secures thousands of systems across all major vertical markets and organizational sizes.
The recent article, “Taking Cybersecurity Lessons To The Bank,” articulates outdated perceptions of application whitelisting, the limitations of blacklisting, and how education is virtually helpless against the growing magnitude of today’s targeted cyber threats. While I agree with most of the article’s assertions around blacklisting and education, the viewpoint on application whitelisting is an example of the quick and trite, and completely outdated, perception of whitelisting that incumbent antivirus companies want people to believe. If security professionals read articles like this one and continue believing the outdated notions, our computers and data will remain easy targets for hackers — and they really don’t have to be. Continue reading this post…
In all my years in the security game — as an officer in the Air Force Information Warfare Center to my current role as president and CEO of CoreTrace — I’ve seen many changes along the way. Through it all, the one thing I’ve learned is that you can’t make sound security decisions relying on outdated information or perceptions, particularly in today’s vastly changing technology arena.
This is why I’ve made it my personal crusade to make sure security and operations professionals everywhere have the most updated information about application whitelisting. Not only did I feel compelled, but I felt it was my obligation to publish the new security brief, “Top Seven Things You Need to Know about Application Whitelisting,” to dispel the myths and outdated perceptions that surround application whitelisting. Continue reading this post…
With all the talk about the motivation behind Intel’s purchase of McAfee, it seems readily apparent that differentiation in the market for mobile devices, from smartphones to laptops, is a primary element of the acquisition. Four things are converging in this market that help explain Intel’s interest in the mobile device market and McAfee — with the last one likely being the most important:
- It is a huge and rapidly growing market, and adoption of the devices continues to skyrocket.
- The devices are basically small computers, with many of the same types of online access, personal information, etc. that other computers have.
- Malware attacks are starting to hit the mobile community, and people need to protect their devices and themselves.
- Intel currently has very little presence in this market, and it needs a foothold — and thus, a why to differentiate themselves from the already entrenched players such as ARM and Qualcomm. Continue reading this post…