“Customers want to get their network back within an hour”

Art Matin, president of McAfee, which is a business unit of Network Associates, talks to Prashant L Rao about the need to be proactive about security threats, McAfee’s anti-spam technology and upcoming product releases

Is the incidence of virus and worm attacks on the rise?
There were more viruses or worms in 2002 than in 2001. If you take the Slammer incident, the speed of propagation of this worm was unique. We will see other viruses or worms taking advantage of such techniques. Firms need to get proactive; they need a shorter window of recovery. Tools like Threatscan let them do vulnerability checks and spot threats before they strike. In 2002 we built protection for 40 percent of threats before they became threats. Customers want to get their network back within an hour. Rapid updation capability and effective bandwidth usage are other goals that customers have.

So far most viruses or worms have targeted PCs or servers. Do you foresee this threat extending to mobile devices as they get connected to the Net?
As mobile phones get connected to the Net in large numbers, the challenges in a wireless world grow exponentially. Any widely deployed platform becomes a threat. In Japan, the most advanced country in terms of mobiles connected to the Internet, there have been serious Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. The challenge is to put scanning capabilities into a form factor that fits into a mobile device. We expect to see scanning taking place on the mobile terminal itself. To this end, we have partnerships with Symbian and TI.

McAfee's traditionally been an anti-virus company. Are there any other lines of business that you are focusing upon?
25-50 percent of a corporation's mail is spam. Gartner has valued the productivity loss incurred by US corporations due to spam at $1 billion. Spam is both an image and legal issue. 27 percent of Fortune 500 firms have had to defend themselves legally on whether they were taking steps to protect their employees from objectionable material in spam. We purchased AntiSpam technology from Deersoft Inc. that detects spam with greater than 95 percent accuracy. The technology is expandable and in April we will release the small business edition for Microsoft Exchange Server. In Q3 we will release versions for Lotus Notes and e-mail gateways.

What's the status of the online security service you had at McAfee.com?
We offer VirusScan online, online firewall, privacy (content filtering) and spam killer (the service will be online by Q2). These services are delivered through SecurityCentre. McAfee.com has 2.4 million subscribers. We are taking new routes to market these services through alliances with large service providers, PC OEM manufacturers and large enterprise customers who buy McAfee.com services for their employees. Agreements have been signed with AOL, Dell and MSN. We co-branded and co-developed the Dell Security Centre. Co-branded and co-developed versions of SecurityCentre offer an access point for consumers to get information about a partner's products.

Can you tell us a bit about your upcoming product releases?
We continue to invest in and enhance all major products in the VirusScan line, VirusScan 7 just started shipping as did WebShield e1000 appliance. The McAfee team in India played an integral role in getting the VirusScan 7 product out and tested. It is a technology leader, the only product that provides in-memory scanning, rapid update capabilities, file server and desktop protection in a single product. Risk management and other capabilities have been added. It is intelligent enough to know that if a file hasn't been opened since the last scan, it is safe to ignore it. The software has a 10 MB profile. The next version of ePO will be out in May. We will extend ePO to include anti-spam, content-filtering and intrusion protection. 20 million nodes are managed by ePO today.

Are you satisfied with the progress of your R&D set-up in Bangalore?
We are really pleased with the skills and contribution made by the Indian team. We have 100 people onsite today. The developers and Quality Assurance team are working on the VirusScan desktop product, Security Management (ePO), GroupShield and WebShield.