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October 18, 2017

McAfee Folds Analytics Into Security Tools

(nikkytok/Shutterstock)

The hackers are winning, and most cyber defenses are reactive despite ongoing efforts to achieve real-time threat detection capabilities. While artificial intelligence approaches are making inroads in the cat-and-mouse game of cyber-security, some security vendors are incorporating advanced analytics into security operations.

Among them is McAfee, which this week released a batch of tools that include a machine learning-based “investigator” designed to harness analytics to prioritize threats along with a tool for securing cloud workloads. The security vendor’s strategy seeks to support security operations centers with analytics and deep learning tools to help pinpoint and stop cyber-threats “from the endpoint to the cloud.”

McAfee’s security tools are based on internal surveys that found the most effective corporate security operations leverage analytics to automate threat detection. Effectiveness “relies on the implementation of advanced analytics technologies, machine learning, deep learning and artificial intelligence, to curate and visualize threat data so security analysts can make sense of it in a short amount of time,” the company argued in announcing is security tools this week.

Along with more accurate threat prediction, the investigator tool uses machine learning to discern evolving malware and other tactics while boosting the overall efficiency of corporate security operations. The endpoint tools leverage analytics with the goal of hastening the delivery of actionable data to security teams.

As more companies move workloads to the cloud, McAfee also said it is targeting hybrid cloud security with a “policy orchestrator” designed to leverage automation to secure workloads without sacrificing performance. The security firm’s web gateway is available on Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN).

Another tool announced this week, a threat defense “sandbox” technology, is available on the Microsoft Azure cloud (NASDAQ: MSFT).

The company also announced an initiative for evaluating images for stegware (the concealment of a file, message, image or video within, for example, another file) and ransomware decryption tool designed to simplify decryption framework development.

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