Image Gallery: McAfee MPower Security Summit Featuring Xerox, Avecto
Cloud security from the device to the cloud was the emphasis of last week’s McAfee MPower Security Summit in Las Vegas.
About 3,000 partners and customers gathered to hear CEO Chris Young say he kept his promise made two years ago to go big in cloud and become cloud-native. Its Mvision is a cloud-native suite that allows customers to deploy security on their own terms as they move to the cloud.
Also during the event, Ken McCray, McAfee’s head of channel sales and operations for the Americas, said his company is going to rebuild its partner program, and is seeking input from partners about what will most benefit them.
McCray urged partners to “lean in and embrace the new tools,” develop a three-year business plan and “continue to measure what matters.”
“You need to focus on growth, how we can growth with you, focus on retaining customers, how do we do that together, and then how do we use the Mvision technology to bring those new customers to us,” he said. “It’s three things, not a bunch of things. Let’s go execute on those three.”
Scroll through our gallery below for highlights.
McAfee CEO Chris Young welcomed attendees and showed the threatscape his company has mapped during the past 30 years. The latest threat is cryptojacking, the unauthorized use of someone else’s computer to mine cryptocurrency. Also, there have been 400-500 percent increases in new malware associated with cryptomining, he said.
Raja Patel, McAfee’s vice president and general manager of corporate security products, introduced Mvision and new additions to the cloud-native suite, including Mvision EDR (endpoint detection response), Mvision Cloud and ePO unified data protection.
Rajiv Gupta, senior vice president of McAfee's cloud security business unit, and founder and CEO of Skyhigh Networks, said his company brought cloud to McAfee, and the two companies realized that cloud security is fundamental if you want to be an IT and security player. McAfee completed its acquisition of Skyhigh Networks, a provider of cloud access security broker (CASB) software, in January.
Walter Isaacson, writer, journalist and Tulane University history professor (pictured with Allison Cerra, McAfee's chief marketing officer), was a special guest keynote and talked about the subjects of his book "The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution," such as Apple's Steve Jobs, and Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician and writer known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine.
Raj Samani, McAfee's chief scientist, presented the discovery of a new cyber-espionage campaign targeting South Korea, the United States and Canada, reusing code from implants last seen in 2010 by the Comment Crew, a Chinese military-affiliated group accused of launching cyberattacks on more than 141 U.S. companies from 2006-2010.
McAfee partners and attendees gathered for the MPower Welcome Reception in the Sponsor Expo. McAfee introduced a new incident response (IR) service that focuses on ensuring customers are able to plan, remediate and minimize the impact of a cyberattack. It consists of a readiness assessment along with an IR plan.
Avecto, an endpoint privilege management provider, is a McAfee Security Innovation Alliance (SIA) partner. Defendpoint, Avecto's security software, combines privilege management and application control technology in a single offering for Windows, macOS and data center.
Xerox is a McAfee partner, and its multifunction printers are bundled with McAfee Embedded Control software to protect any data associated with them.
The Innovation Fair gave attendees a glimpse into what McAfee has planned in the areas of threat defense, data protection, intelligent security operations and cloud defense.
Partners and customers talk business in the Networking Theater during the welcome reception.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, professor of computer science at the University of Oxford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and inventor of the world wide web (pictured right), was a special guest keynote and talked about the history of and ongoing issues with the internet. During a Q&A with Rob Sloan, the Wall Street Journal's cybersecurity research director (pictured left), he said the end of net neutrality was "unfortunate" and that the single biggest threat to the internet is it being controlled by a single government or company, or "an insidious combination."
Steve Grobman, McAfee's senior vice president and chief technology officer, said it's too late to do anything about potential manipulation in the midterm elections, but his company is in the process of initiating discussions to help safeguard future elections. McAfee has been researching the possibility for manipulation — with disturbing results.
