Evaluation of McAfee Antivirus

McAfee

McAfee, now known as Intel Security is the world’s largest dedicated security software company. Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, the company was acquired by Intel in 2010 and is now a part of the Intel Security division [1]. Founded in 1987, the company played a very important role in the design and development of various security initiatives like Firewall toolkit, file encryption and public key infrastructure including parts of open source development for Linux, FreeBSD and Darwin.

McAfee offers a slew of products ranging from basic antivirus protection to high-end data encryption and Security-as-a-Service products for data centers and End-point protection services, that serve home users, SMBs and enterprises.

For Home users, McAfee offers three plans – An yearly antivirus plan for $59.99, an Internet security plan for $79.99 and a total protection plan for $89.99 a year, the difference being that customers get encryption and advanced spam blocking services in the total protection and internet plans [2].

For small and medium businesses (SMBs), there are three plans ranging from $15.99 for the basic protection to $50.15 for the advanced end point protection. McAfee also offers a free virus removal service for SMBs. This is a great product at this price point looking at the expertise offered by a company that has pioneered the security business and started a multimillion-dollar security software industry [3].

However, over the past few years McAfee has handled product quality with mediocrity. Reviews over multiple sites rated McAfee much lower than what was expected of the security behemoth. One of the concerns with McAfee was that while it protects from malware effectively, it is not good at removing an infection should the PC get infected. The other concern was that the interface is not so intuitive, which makes it difficult for normal users to get around the system. Reviewers have also found issues with the malware protection in the Security-as-a-Service program stating that the malware [3]. Another CNET review had flagged the inconsistencies and performance issues as the biggest problem at McAfee, bringing down is reliability and safety to a large extent. CNET review had concluded saying that McAfee may not be the safest option for security solutions.

McAfee has had its own share of issues with updates to virus definitions and software updates. In 2010, a virus definition update had caused outage on millions of computers worldwide due to an error and had led to widespread losses to business and day-to-day activities [4]. In 2011, McAfee.com, the company’s corporate site was reported for serious security issues that could lead to information disclosure [5]. In August 2012, an issue with an update to McAfee antivirus for home and enterprise computers turned off the antivirus protection and, in many cases, prevented connection to the Internet. McAfee was criticized for being slow to address the problem, forcing network operations to spend time diagnosing the issue [6]. This history of issues with updates and the lapses in some of the quality measures at McAfee could be a potential risk to a company that has few employees and a smaller revenue base.