MCAFEE ENHANCES NETWORK SECURITY PLATFORM

Network Security Solution Extends Interoperability with Third Party Products and Supports Virtual Data Center Environments

McAfee today announced enhancements to its Network Security Platform, reflecting its commitment to unparalleled threat protection, network performance and operational excellence. The latest release of McAfee Network Security Platform includes enhanced botnet control through reputation intelligence, virtual network inspection and a traffic analysis port for network monitoring, forensics and other advanced analysis engines. With this release, McAfee continues to move beyond traditional Network Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS), by providing a greater level of network intelligence across both physical and virtual environments.

“Our customers need more than just signature-based IPS,” said Rees Johnson, senior vice president and general manager of network security at McAfee. “McAfee Network Security Platform goes well beyond traditional Network IPS with the addition of McAfee Global Threat Intelligence, support for virtual environments, and the ability to correlate across endpoint and network products.”

In the most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network IPS[1], Gartner states, “As vulnerability research has improved, the gap between vulnerability exploitation and IPS signatures to protect that vulnerability has closed. Future protection improvements of significance will come from bringing intelligence into the IPS from external sources instead – points the IPS does not normally have visibility within.”

Real-time, reputation-based intelligence through McAfee Global Threat Intelligence provides McAfee Network Security Platform users with additional context for enforcing network security policies, not to mention faster, more accurate threat detection.

The latest release of McAfee Network Security Platform includes:

• Enhanced botnet control: File and network connection reputation feeds from cloud-based McAfee Global Threat Intelligence allows Network Security Platform to perform in-line botnet prevention based on over 60 million malware samples and the reputation of hundreds of millions of network connections based on over two billion IP reputation queries each month. This external intelligence provides vital context for faster, more accurate detection and prevention.
• Traffic analysis port: Traffic redirect capabilities allow arbitrary network traffic to be subjected to additional inspection by McAfee and third party products, including data loss prevention, network forensics and advanced malware analysis tools.
• Virtual network inspection: Enables the Network Security Platform sensors to examine inter virtual machine traffic on virtual environments and provide attack detection for virtual data center environments. Network Security Platform can inspect traffic both within virtual environments and between virtual and physical environments, giving organizations the same level of visibility regardless of where the traffic flows.

As enterprises consolidate data centers, adopt cloud-services, and virtualize critical infrastructure they need a way to unify security management across physical and virtual infrastructures. In partnership with Reflex Systems – a leader in virtualization management solutions – McAfee brings its industry-leading threat detection and security management to virtual environments.

“Virtualization is becoming a standard part of every enterprise data center infrastructure - be it in-house or in the cloud - and organizations are recognizing that they must extend enterprise-class security and management into the virtual environment,” said Preston Futrell, President and CEO of Reflex Systems. “We are pleased to partner with McAfee to help customers seamlessly integrate virtualization security and management into their existing security infrastructure, systems and best-practices.”

Together, McAfee and Reflex Systems will offer integrated virtual and physical security and management that enables customers to holistically monitor and understand security issues, easily apply best practices, and provide comprehensive reporting for compliance purposes across the current and next generation data center infrastructure.

“When building out Savvis’ enterprise cloud offerings, it was imperative that we base our cloud architecture on a strong security foundation with the right tools to provide customers piece of mind as they begin leveraging new cloud technologies in the data center,” said Ken Owens, Savvis technical vice president for security and virtualization technologies. “Bringing together two best-of-breed solutions like Reflex and McAfee to meet the unique, dynamic security and management challenges in both the physical and virtual infrastructure will go a long way in helping accelerate the adoption of virtualization and cloud technology.”

For more information about McAfee Network Security visit http://www.mcafee.com/us/products/network-defense/index.aspx.

About McAfee

McAfee, a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC), is the world's largest dedicated security technology company. McAfee delivers proactive and proven solutions and services that help secure systems, networks, and mobile devices around the world, allowing users to safely connect to the Internet, browse and shop the Web more securely. Backed by its unrivaled Global Threat Intelligence, McAfee creates innovative products that empower home users, businesses, the public sector and service providers by enabling them to prove compliance with regulations, protect data, prevent disruptions, identify vulnerabilities, and continuously monitor and improve their security. McAfee is relentlessly focused on constantly finding new ways to keep our customers safe. http://www.mcafee.com