Security giant McAfee has agreed to be acquired by Intel. When I caught the announcement in an early tweet it didn't strike me as exciting news. I pictured Intel buying McAfee as like GE buying Whirlpool – an event at high corporate levels that won't much affect the average user.
McAfee seems very, very positive, though. Dave DeWalt, McAfee's president and chief executive, said the agreement "is big news for McAfee and big news for Intel, but bigger news for our combined customers, the security industry and the future of the Internet."
Other analysts seem to think that there may be long-term security effects on embedded software and hardware, including the Atom processor.
DeWalt's blog post on the subject paints a glowing future, as does a post by McAfee chief technology officer and vice president George Kurtz.
When the acquisition is complete McAfee will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel helmed by Renée James, Intel's senior vice president and general manager of software and services. James expects to release an Intel-McAfee product sometime in the next year. What will it be?
McAfee's DeWalt mentioned an interesting possibility: "The current cyber-security model isn't extensible across the proliferating spectrum of devices. Providing protection to a heterogeneous world of connected devices requires a fundamentally new approach," he said.
Could this herald a new age of hardware-based security, or PCs that resist malicious attacks at a level below the operating system?
This isn't Intel's first foray into security. It used to offer a product called LanDesk Virus Protect, but it sold that division to Symantec in 1998. I'm hoping the McAfee acquisition actually results in that promised "fundamentally new approach," not just more of the same under a different label. For now all we can do is wait and watch.