Intel Introduced Doubtful Security Plan

After Chipzilla had bought the worldwide-known insecurity company McAfee, lots of industry experts wondered why, and recently Intel finally released the results of its collaboration.

Intel has developed a security system called Deepsafe. According to the giant, this system will work outside the operating system at the chip level, watching the hardware for signs of malware being active. The system in question is expected to be quite good at tackling rootkit malware attacks, because they also happen outside the operating system. For example, McAfee’s own threat report quoted the statistics which mentioned the number of rootkit infections discovered in the 6 months of this year being up 32% year-on-year.

At the same time, media reports revealed that the industry observers aren’t quite sure that the new idea of the company will make much difference in this field. For instance, Wendy Nather, which works as a security analyst from the 451 Group and is also known as a former IT security director at UBS, explained that Intel has actually had the security modules the new system is based on in their chipset for a while now. The only problem is that venders could not be even bothered to use them, as this demands development where they thought there was not much market interest.

The security system updates would be a bit more disruptive than the current security software patches – in fact, it would be more about changing the foundations of a building from underneath it. As for the first McAfee product based on this security system, it is Deep Defender, and it’ll be out there in the stores in the beginning of 2012. Wendy Nather pointed out that Intel is simply doing the same things as McAfee has already been doing now and moving them into the chipset. As you can understand, this doesn’t sound too exciting.

Meanwhile, the real area in which chip-level security would be very interesting is embedded systems. This is because they are being used virtually everywhere – from smart meters to mobile devices, in which, as you know, a lot of money are being invested in order to secure them. In short words, Deepsafe is a system which softly hints that the technology isn’t actually being targeted at personal computers at all. Instead, it can mean Intel’s move into the mobile market.

McAfee Lost Key Employees

McAfee, the worldwide-known insecurity outfit, which was purchased by chip giant Intel, has just lost a couple of key employees. Meanwhile, the company is expected to introduce a new generation of security products in the nearest future.

George Kurtz, the worldwide chief technology officer, known for helping lead the McAfee’s product strategy, is going to leave the company by the end of October. However, he isn’t the first key staff member leaving the company: vice president Dmitri Alperovitch, a highly regarded threat researcher known for his work at McAfee that helped give the outfit a reputation for conducting cutting-edge research on hacking, has already slipped out the back door. Surprisingly enough, few noticed his move, as the media didn’t observe the event at all.

Dmitri Alperovitch was leading a research team which released a number of high-profile studies on alleged Chinese-government backed hackers. He is also known worldwide for coining the term “Operation Aurora” to describe hacker attacks suspected by Chinese intruders on the largest search engine Google and many other organizations.

Alperovitch was last mentioned in the press when his team discovered so-called “Operation ShadyRAT” – one of the largest cyber attacks throughout the globe, which caused the infiltration of the networks of seventy-two outfits, including the UN and numerous governments and companies all over the globe. However, the papers say Alperovitch will be doing a bit of work for McAfee as a consultant.

The industry observers only noticed the lack of the two key figures of the company when they were not found on the speakers list at the McAfee’s annual security conference. The rumors are that the two left because they weren’t happy about Intel’s involvement with China. The insecurity outfit has operations in China, but Intel features a much bigger manufacturing and marketing presence there. Operation ShadyRAT pointing the finger at that country must have caused some problems for the company. So, it seems that since Alperovitch has never openly pointed at China for some cyber espionage cases, it might have more to do with Intel than Alperovitch really wanted to say.

The company announced that the two key positions have been filled internally. Alperovitch was replaced by David Marcus, director of security research for McAfee Labs, and George Kurtz’s place is filled by Stuart McClure.