McAfee Brings AI to Security With New Products

McAfee, at its first MPOWER event since leaving the Intel corporate fold, has made a series of product announcements focused on analytics and security. The new Investigator product takes the lead, with additional products announced for SOCs, endpoints and cloud platforms.

McAfee Investigator is an analytics platform that, according to McAfee, includes both artifical intelligence and machine learning components in order to bring clarity to the mass of data accumulating in most security operations centers on a daily basis. In the statement announcing Investigator, McAfee said that the servie is designed to provide more accurate threat prioritization; faster, more thorough malware investigation; and increased SOC efficiency. In all of these areas, investigator is intended to work in concert with human security analysts rather than as a replacement for them.

McAfee's AI functions are able to take security data and analyze it, prioritizing the important information found inside the data and then providing that information to analysts in a visual format intended to make it faster and easier for humans to respond. In particular, Investigator's analysis should allow security professionals to quickly understand which information is important and what might be done with it.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are also taking their places in McAfee's endpoint protection. The company announced that new capabilities for McAfee endpoint software and services include decision-making with deep learning, pre- and post-execution machine learning and machine learning with reach.

In pre- and post-execution machine learning, McAfee endpoint machine learning reviews files before and after they execute, comparing the two and gaining knowledge with new data. The knowledge gained is amplified by what McAfee is calling machine learning with reach: 300 million sensors around the world serve as a source to inform algorithms. The additional data should allow the AI to reach more accurate conclusions far faster than would be possible with the data from a single system (or networ) alone.

In the final major announcements of the morning, McAfee dove into the cloud by announcing the new McAfee Cloud Workload Security which is intended to bring hybrid cloud architectures into the McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator fold with increased protection and visibility, and the availability of McAfee Web Gateway to AWS.

McAfee's MPOWER conference runs through the rest of the week; more announcements are anticipated during the conference.

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— Curtis Franklin is the editor of SecurityNow.com. Follow him on Twitter @kg4gwa.