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I work in security and let me explain why McAfee products are so commonplace in corporate environments, even when there are vastly better alternatives out there

I work in security and let me explain why McAfee products are so commonplace in corporate environments, even when there are vastly better alternatives out there. You want an AV product? Done You want a firewall product? Done You want central management? Done You want SIEM? Done etc etc Are any of their products amazing compared to the alternatives? No! Do they integrate seamlessly with each other? No! Are they cheaper than alternatives? Probably not! But. They provide a solution for every checkbox. And it's easy to convince management and auditors that you have done 'the right thing' by using a well known brand. And this in turn gets pass marks from the auditors. A specific note about integration between products, McAfee has a history of buying good security software companies and basically destroying them. The integrations usually 'barely work' and after enough people complain and the original core devs have packed up and left, they basically scuttle the product. Remember when 'Foundstone' was a vulnerability scanner that was an actual alternative to Nessus and not the consulting arm of McAfee? I do and I'm still sad they gutted it.

swiley 6y ago
I worked at a large American defense (blob? I don't know what the correct business term is) that put every damn McAfee product (all kinds of zany things I had never even heard of) on everyone's computers. One particularly bad piece of software would intercept filesystem syscalls and I guess generate hashes from the data to do some sort of scan? Whatever it did made hg and the build tools almost unusable. For years everyone that was a member of the "engineering" group on the network was exempt but I guess someone realized managers were part of that and you had jump through administrative hoops to get temporary exemptions. We had these amazing machines. I think the laptop I had might have been nearly as powerful as the desktop I just built, but my 10 year old thinkpad could consistently outperform them thanks to McAfee.
- WorldPeas 6y ago
  I believe the term you're probably looking for is conglomerate
GordonS 6y ago
I work in the enterprise space, and Mcafee is the AV I see the most, and I believe largely for the "checkbox compliance" reasons you mentioned. Personally, I find Mcafee AV to be absolutely fucking horrible. It installs something like 10 Windows services, and runs about 15 processes, and it always consumes by far more CPU than anything else on my system - and I run Docker, Rider, etc, so actually put the system through it's paces. As an aside, I'm currently working with a company that was recently hit by a randsomware attack. They have responded by installing two endpoint protection (aka next gen AV) systems, another DLP system (Mcafee DLP is already installed), and a kill switch that let's them remotely destroy a machine. The end result is that a machine that was previously severely degraded by Mcafee, is now a machine that is at times unusable, and permanently sounds like an aircraft taking off. I don't think they're even done - I'm pretty sure they're going to install more crapware! This BTW is a company that sends about 10 internal spam mails a day, many of which are images or/and full of spelling mistakes, and some of which are asking you to download and install .exe files...

swiley 6y ago

I worked at a large American defense (blob? I don't know what the correct business term is) that put every damn McAfee product (all kinds of zany things I had never even heard of) on everyone's computers. One particularly bad piece of software would intercept filesystem syscalls and I guess generate hashes from the data to do some sort of scan? Whatever it did made hg and the build tools almost unusable. For years everyone that was a member of the "engineering" group on the network was exempt but I guess someone realized managers were part of that and you had jump through administrative hoops to get temporary exemptions. We had these amazing machines. I think the laptop I had might have been nearly as powerful as the desktop I just built, but my 10 year old thinkpad could consistently outperform them thanks to McAfee.

WorldPeas 6y ago
I believe the term you're probably looking for is conglomerate

GordonS 6y ago

I work in the enterprise space, and Mcafee is the AV I see the most, and I believe largely for the "checkbox compliance" reasons you mentioned. Personally, I find Mcafee AV to be absolutely fucking horrible. It installs something like 10 Windows services, and runs about 15 processes, and it always consumes by far more CPU than anything else on my system - and I run Docker, Rider, etc, so actually put the system through it's paces. As an aside, I'm currently working with a company that was recently hit by a randsomware attack. They have responded by installing two endpoint protection (aka next gen AV) systems, another DLP system (Mcafee DLP is already installed), and a kill switch that let's them remotely destroy a machine. The end result is that a machine that was previously severely degraded by Mcafee, is now a machine that is at times unusable, and permanently sounds like an aircraft taking off. I don't think they're even done - I'm pretty sure they're going to install more crapware! This BTW is a company that sends about 10 internal spam mails a day, many of which are images or/and full of spelling mistakes, and some of which are asking you to download and install .exe files...