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Top Cyber Security Threats to Look Out for in 2021

2020 was unexpectedly  defined by a global pandemic. Throughout the year, we have all had to figure out how to best live our lives online – from working from home to distance learning to digitally connecting with loved ones.  As 2020 comes to a close, we must ask: will this new normal continue into 2021, and how will it affect how we connect – both with each other and with our online world?

McAfee assessed the cybersecurity landscape as we head into the New Year, highlighting the key takeaways we should keep in mind to help protect our digital lives:

Hacking the Home

Home is a safe space – or is it? With more consumers living and working from home, we have seen an increase in connected devices within the home. In fact, since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, McAfee Secure Home Platform device monitoring shows a 22% increase in the number of connected home devices globally and a 60% increase in the U.S. These trends are also carrying over into mobile shopping habits. Almost 80% of shoppers have found themselves using their IoT devices to make more purchases since the beginning of the pandemic. The evolving world of the connected lifestyle gives hackers more potential entry points to homes and consumers information- through devices, apps and web services- and in 2021, we will be monitoring how this trend evolves.

With more of us working remotely, distance learning, and seeking online entertainment, cybercriminals will look to exploit our vulnerabilities. For example, remote employees are more likely to use personal devices while working and log onto home networks that are not fully secured. What’s more, many of the systems behind consumer networks have not had their passwords changed from the default settings since it was first introduced into the home . If a criminal can use the default credentials to hack the consumer’s network infrastructure, they may also gain access to other network devices – whether they are used for school, work, or leisure.

New Mobile Payment Scams

Touchless solutions for payments are becoming more popular as we all navigate the curveballs of COVID-19. Mobile payment apps provide the convenience of both paying for services and receiving payments without the hazards of touching cases or credit and debit cards.  However, fraudsters are also following the money to mobile, as research by RSA’s Fraud and Risk Intelligence team shows that 72% of cyber fraud activity involved mobile in the fourth quarter of 2019. McAfee predicts an increase in “receive”-based exploits in 2021, since they provide a quick and easily entry for fraudsters to scam unsuspicious consumers by combining phishing with payment URLs.

Imagine receiving an email stating that you’re receiving a refund for a concert that was canceled due to COVID-19. The email instructs you to click on the URL in the next message, fill in your bank information, and “accept the refund.” But instead of getting your money back, you find that you’ve handed over your financial data to scammers. As we continue to adopt mobile payment methods in 2021, it’s important to remember that hackers will likely take advantage of these convenient touchless systems.

 “Qshing” or QR Code Abuse

With the pandemic, more industries have QR codes to make our lives easier- with Statista reporting that over 11 million US households are expected to scan QR codes by 2020.  From restaurants to personal care salons to fitness studies, QR codes help limit direct contact with consumers – you easily scan the code, see services/items offered, and select and purchase your desired items. But do you stop and think about how this might be putting your personal data at risk? As it turns out, QR codes provide scammers with a new avenue for disguising themselves as legitimate businesses and spreading malicious links.

Scammers are quick to exploit popular or new technology for their malicious tricks, and QR codes are no different. In fact, McAfee predicts that hackers will find opportunities to use social engineering to gain access to our personal data in a single scan. Take restaurant owners looking to make QR codes that give us quick access to their menus. Knowing that these business owners are looking to download apps that generate QR codes, bad actors are predicted to entice them into downloading malicious apps that pretend to do the same.

But instead of generating a code, the app will steal the owner’s data, which scammers could then use to trick loyal diners like you and me. Once a hacker gains access to the restaurant’s customer database, they can use this information to launch phishing scams under the guise of our favorite local eateries.

Stay Secure in 2021 and Beyond

To help ensure that you are one step ahead of cybercriminals in the upcoming year, make a resolution to adopt the following online security practices and help protect your digital life:

Be cautious of emails asking you to act 

If you receive an email, call, or text asking you to download software, app, or pay a certain amount of money, do not click or take any direct action from the message. Instead, go straight to the organization’s website. This will prevent you from downloading malicious content from phishing links or forking over money unnecessarily.

Hover over links to see and verify the URL

If someone sends you a message with a link, hover over the link without clicking. This will allow you to see a link preview and check for any typos or grammatical errors – both of which are typical signs of a phishing link. If the URL looks suspicious, don’t interact with it and delete the message altogether.

Use strong, unique passwords

When setting up a new IoT device, network, or online account, always change the default credentials to a password or passphrase that is strong and unique. Using different passwords or passphrases for each of your online accounts helps protect the majority of your data if one of your accounts becomes vulnerable.

Browse with caution

Use a comprehensive security solution, like McAfee Total Protection, which can help protect devices against malware, phishing attacks, and other threats. It includes McAfee WebAdvisor, which can help identify malicious websites.

Stay Updated

To stay updated on all things McAfee and on top of the latest consumer and mobile security threats, follow @McAfee_Home  on Twitter, listen to our podcast Hackable?, and ‘Like’ us on Facebook.

The post Top Security Threats to Look Out for in 2021 appeared first on McAfee Blogs.

The December 2020 revelations around the SUNBURST campaigns exploiting the SolarWinds Orion platform have revealed a new attack vector – the supply chain – that will continue to be exploited.

The ever-increasing use of connected devices, apps and web services in our homes will also make us more susceptible to digital home break-ins. This threat is compounded by many individuals continuing to work from home, meaning this threat not only impacts the consumer and their families, but enterprises as well.

Attacks on cloud platforms and users will evolve into a highly polarized state where they are either “mechanized and widespread” or “sophisticated and precisely handcrafted”.

Mobile users will need to beware of phishing or smishing messages aimed at exploiting and defrauding them through mobile payment services.

The use of QR codes has notably accelerated during the pandemic, raising the specter of a new generation of social engineering techniques that seek to exploit consumers and gain access to their personal data.

Finally, the most sophisticated threat actors will increasingly use social networks to target high value individuals working in sensitive industry sectors and roles.

A new year offers hope and opportunities for consumers and enterprises, but also more cybersecurity challenges. I hope you find these helpful in planning your 2021 security strategies.

–Raj Samani, Chief Scientist and McAfee Fellow, Advanced Threat Research 

Twitter @Raj_Samani 

2021 Predictions  

By Steve Grobman 

The revelations around the SolarWinds-SUNBURST espionage campaign will spark a proliferation in copycat supply chain attacks of this kind.  

On December 13, 2020, the cybersecurity industry learned nation-state threat actors had compromised SolarWinds’s Orion IT monitoring and management software and used it to distribute a malicious software backdoor called SUNBURST to dozens of that company’s customers, including several high-profile U.S. government agencies.  

This SolarWinds-SUNBURST campaign is the first major supply chain attack of its kind and has been referred to by many as the “Cyber Pearl Harbor” that U.S. cybersecurity experts have been predicting for a decade and a half.  

The campaign also represents a shift in tactics where nation state threat actors have employed a new weapon for cyber-espionage.  Just as the use of nuclear weapons at the end of WWII changed military strategy for the next 75 years, the use of a supply chain attack has changed the way we need to consider defense against cyber-attacks.   

This supply chain attack operated at the scale of a worm such as WannaCry in 2017, combined with the precision and lethality of the 2014 Sony Pictures or 2015 U.S. government Office of Personnel Management (OPM) attacks. 

Within hours of its discovery, the magnitude of the campaign became frighteningly clear to organizations responsible for U.S. national security, economic competitiveness, and even consumer privacy and security.  

It enables U.S. adversaries to steal all manners of information, from inter-governmental communications to national secrets. Attackers can, in turn, leverage this information to influence or impact U.S. policy through malicious leaks.  Every breached agency may have different secondary cyber backdoors planted, meaning that there is no single recipe to evict the intrusion across the federal government. 

While some may argue that government agencies are legitimate targets for nation-state spy craft, the campaign also impacted private companies. Unlike government networks which store classified information on isolated networks, private organizations often have critical intellectual property on networks with access to the internet.  Exactly what intellectual property or private data on employees has been stolen will be difficult to determine, and the full extent of the theft may never be known.  

This type of attack also poses a threat to individuals and their families given that in today’s highly interconnected homes, a breach of consumer electronics companies can result in attackers using their access to smart appliances such as TVs, virtual assistants, and smart phones to steal their information or act as a gateway to attack businesses while users are working remotely from home. 

What makes this type of attack so dangerous is that it uses trusted software to bypass cyber defenses, infiltrate victim organizations with the backdoor and allow the attacker to take any number of secondary steps. This could involve stealing data, destroying data, holding critical systems for ransom, orchestrating system malfunctions that result in kinetic damage, or simply implanting additional malicious content throughout the organization to stay in control even after the initial threat appears to have passed. 

McAfee believes the discovery of the SolarWinds-SUNBURST campaign will expose attack techniques that other malicious actors around the world will seek to duplicate in 2021 and beyond. 

By Suhail Ansari, Dattatraya Kulkarni and Steve Povolny 

 The increasingly dense overlay of numerous connected devices, apps and web services used in our professional and private lives will grow the connected home’s attack surface to the point that it raises significant new risks for individuals and their employers. 

 While the threat to connected homes is not new, what is new is the emergence of increased functionality in both home and business devices, and the fact that these devices connect to each other more than ever before. Compounding this is the increase in remote work – meaning many of us are using these connected devices more than ever. 

In 2020,the global pandemic shifted employees from the office to the home, making the home environment a work environment. In fact, since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, McAfee Secure Home Platform device monitoring shows a 22% increase in the number of connected home devices globally and a 60% increase in the U.S. Over 70% of the traffic from these devices originated from smart phones, laptops, other PCs and TVs, and over 29% originated from IoT devices such as streaming devices, gaming consoles, wearables, and smart lights.

McAfee saw cybercriminals increase their focus on the home attack surface with a surge in various phishing message schemes across communications channels. The number of malicious phishing links McAfee blocked grew over 21% from March to November, at an average of over 400 links per home.  

 This increase is significant and suggests a flood of phishing messages with malicious links entered home networks through devices with weaker security measures.  

 Millions of individual employees have become responsible for their employer’s IT security in a home office filled with “soft” targets, unprotected devices from the kitchen, to the family room, to the bedroom. Many of these home devices are “orphaned” in that their manufacturers fail to properly support them with security updates addressing new threats or vulnerabilities.  

This contrasts with a corporate office environment filled with devices “hardened” by enterprise-grade security measures. We now work with consumer-grade networking equipment configured by “us” and lacking the central management, regular software updates and security monitoring of the enterprise.   

Because of this, we believe cybercriminals will advance the home as an attack surface for campaigns targeting not only our families but also corporations. The hackers will take advantage of the home’s lack of regular firmware updates, lack of security mitigation features, weak privacy policies, vulnerability exploits, and user susceptibility to social engineering.  

By compromising the home environment, these malicious actors will launch a variety of attacks on corporate as well as consumer devices in 2021. 

By Sandeep Chandana  

Attacks on cloud platforms will evolve into a highly polarized state where they are either “mechanized and widespread” or “targeted and precisely handcrafted”.  

The COVID-19 pandemic has also hastened the pace of the corporate IT transition to the cloud, accelerating the potential for new corporate cloud-related attack schemes. With increased cloud adoption and the large number of enterprises working from home, not only is there a growing number of cloud users but also a lot more data both in motion and being transacted.  

 McAfee cloud usage data from more than 30 million McAfee MVISION Cloud users worldwide shows a 50% increase overall in enterprise cloud use across all industries the first four months of 2020. Our analysis showed an increase across all cloud categories, usage of collaboration services such as Microsoft O365 by 123%, increase in use of business services such as Salesforce by 61% and the largest growth in collaboration services such as Cisco Webex (600%), Zoom (+350%), Microsoft Teams (+300%), and Slack (+200%). From January to April 2020, corporate cloud traffic from unmanaged devices increased 100% across all verticals.  

 During the same period, McAfee witnessed a surge in attacks on cloud accounts, an estimated 630% increase overall, with variations in the sectors that were targeted. Transportation led vertical industries with a 1,350% increase in cloud attacks, followed by education (+1,114%), government (+773%), manufacturing (+679%), financial services (+571%) and energy and utilities (+472%).  

The increasing proportion of unmanaged devices accessing the enterprise cloud has effectively made home networks an extension of the enterprise infrastructure. Cybercriminals will develop new, highly mechanized, widespread attacks for better efficacy against thousands of heterogenous home networks.  

One example could be a widespread brute force attack against O365 users, where the attacker seeks to leverage stolen credentials and exploit users’ poor practice of re-using passwords across different platforms and applications. As many as 65% of users reuse the same password for multiple or all accounts according to a 2019 security survey conducted by Google. Where an attacker would traditionally need to manually encode first and last name combinations to find valid usernames, a learning algorithm could be used to predict O365 username patterns.  

Additionally, cybercriminals could use AI and ML to bypass traditional network filtering technologies deployed to protect cloud instances. Instead of launching a classic brute force attack from compromised IPs until the IPs are blocked, resource optimization algorithms will be used to make sure the compromised IPs launch attacks against multiple services and sectors, to maximize the lifespan of compromised IPs used for the attacks. Distributed algorithms and reinforcement learning will be leveraged to identify attack plans primarily focused on avoiding account lockouts.   

McAfee also predicts that, as enterprise cloud security postures mature, attackers will be forced to handcraft highly targeted exploits for specific enterprises, users and applications.  

The recent Capital One breach was an example of an advanced attack of this kind. The attack was thoroughly cloud-native. It was sophisticated and intricate in that a number of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations across cloud applications (and infrastructure) were exploited and chained. It was not a matter of chance that the hackers were successful, as the attack was very well hand-crafted.  

 We believe attackers will start leveraging threat surfaces across devices, networks and the cloud in these ways in the months and years ahead. 

By Suhail Ansari and Dattatraya Kulkarni

As users become more and more reliant on mobile payments, cybercriminals will increasingly seek to exploit and defraud users with scam SMS phishing or smishing messages containing malicious payment URLs.

 Mobile payments have become more and more popular as a convenient mechanism to conduct transactions. A Worldpay Global Payments Report for 2020 estimated that 41% of payments today are on mobile devices, and this number looks to increase  at the expense of traditional credit and debit cards by 2023. An October 2020 study by Allied Market Research found that the global mobile payment market size was valued at $1.48 trillion in 2019, and is projected to reach $12.06 trillion by 2027, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 30.1% from 2020 to 2027.  

Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has driven the adoption of mobile payment methods higher as consumers have sought to avoid contact-based payments such as cash or physical credit cards. 

But fraudsters have followed the money to mobile, pivoting from PC browsers and credit cards to mobile payments. According to research by RSA’s Fraud and Risk Intelligence team, 72% of cyber fraud activity involved the mobile channel in the fourth quarter of 2019. The researchers observed that this represented “the highest percentage of fraud involving mobile apps in nearly two years and underscores a broader shift away from fraud involving web browsers on PCs.” 

McAfee predicts there will be an increase in “receive”-based mobile payment exploits, where a user receives a phishing email, direct message or smishing message telling him that he can receive a payment, transaction refund or cash prize by clicking on a malicious payment URL. Instead of receiving a payment, however, the user has been conned into sending a payment from his account.  

This could take shape in schemes where fraudsters set up a fake call center using a product return and servicing scam, where the actors send a link via email or SMS, offering a refund via a mobile payment app, but the user is unaware that they are agreeing to pay versus receiving a refund. The figures below show the fraudulent schemes in action.  

Mobile wallets are making efforts to make it easier for users to understand whether they are paying or receiving. Unfortunately, as the payment methods proliferate, fraudsters succeed in finding victims who either cannot distinguish credit from debit or can be prompted into quick action by smart social engineering.  

Governments and banks are making painstaking efforts to educate users to understand the use of one-time passwords (OTPs) and that they should not be shared. Adoption of frameworks such as caller ID authentication (also known as STIR/SHAKEN) help in ensuring that the caller ID is not masked by fraudsters, but they do not prevent a fraudster from registering an entity that has a name close to the genuine provider of service. 

In the same way that mobile apps have simplified the ability to conduct transactions, McAfee predicts the technology is making it easier to take advantage of the convenience for fraudulent purposes. 

By Suhail Ansari and Dattatraya Kulkarni 

Cybercriminals will seek new and ever cleverer ways to use social engineering and QR Code practices to gain access to consumer victims’ personal data. 

The global pandemic has created the need for all of us to operate and transact in all areas of our lives in a “contactless” way. Accordingly, it should come as no surprise that QR codes have emerged as a convenient input mechanism to make mobile transactions more efficient.  

QR code usage has proliferated into many areas, including payments, product marketing, packaging, restaurants, retail, and recreation just to name a few. QR codes are helping limit direct contact between businesses and consumers in every setting from restaurants to personal care salons, to fitness studios. They allow them to easily scan the code, shop for services or items offered, and easily purchase them.  

A September 2020 survey by MobileIron found that 86% of respondents scanned a QR code over the course of the previous year and over half (54%) reported an increase in the use of such codes since the pandemic began. Respondents felt most secure using QR codes at restaurants or bars (46%) and retailers (38%). Two-thirds (67%) believe that the technology makes life easier in a touchless world and over half (58%) wish to see it used more broadly in the future.  

In just the area of discount coupons, an estimated 1.7 billion coupons using QR codes were scanned globally in 2017, and that number is expected to increase by a factor of three to 5.3 billion by 2022. In just four years, from 2014 to 2018, the use of QR codes on consumer product packaging in Korea and Japan increased by 83%. The use of QR codes in such “smart” packaging is increasing at an annual rate of 8% globally.  

In India, the government’s Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) uses QR codes in association with Aadhaar, India’s unique ID number, to enable readers to download citizens’ demographic information as well as their photographs. 

However, the technicalities of QR codes are something of a mystery to most users, and that makes them potentially dangerous if cybercriminals seek to exploit them to target victims.  

The MobileIron report found that whereas 69% of respondents believe they can distinguish a malicious URL based on its familiar text-based format, only 37% believe they can distinguish a malicious QR code using its unique dot pattern format. Given that QR codes are designed precisely to hide the text of the URL, users find it difficult to identify and even suspect malicious QR codes. 

Almost two-thirds (61%) of respondents know that QR codes can open a URL and almost half (49%) know that a QR code can download an application. But fewer than one-third (31%) realize that a QR code can make a payment, cause a user to follow someone on social media (22%), or start a phone call (21%). A quarter of respondents admit scanning a QR code that did something unexpected (such as take them to a suspicious website), and 16% admitted that they were unsure if a QR code actually did what it was intended to do. 

It is therefore no surprise that QR codes have been used in phishing schemes to avoid anti-phishing solutions’ attempts to identify malicious URLs within email messages. They can also be used on webpages or social media. 

In such schemes, victims scan fraudulent QRs and find themselves taken to malicious websites where they are asked to provide login, personal info, usernames and passwords, and payment information, which criminals then steal. The sites could also be used to simply download malicious programs onto a user’s device.  

McAfee  predicts that hackers will increasingly use these QR code schemes and broaden them using social engineering techniques. For instance, knowing that business owners are looking to download QR code generator apps, bad actors will entice consumers into downloading malicious QR code generator apps that pretend to do the same. In the process of generating the QR code (or even pretending to be generating the correct QR code), the malicious apps will steal the victim’s sensitive data, which scammers could then use for a variety of fraudulent purposes.  

Although the QR codes themselves are a secure and convenient mechanism, we expect them to be misused by bad actors in 2021 and beyond. 

By Raj Samani 

McAfee predicts that sophisticated cyber adversaries will increasingly target, engage and compromise corporate victims using social networks as an attack vector.  

Cyber adversaries have traditionally relied heavily on phishing emails as an attack vector for compromising organizations through individual employees. However, as organizations have implemented spam detection, data loss prevention (DLP) and other solutions to prevent phishing attempts on corporate email accounts, more sophisticated adversaries are pivoting to target employees through social networking platforms to which these increasingly effective defenses cannot be applied. 

McAfee has observed such threat actors increasingly using the messaging features of LinkedIn, What’s App, Facebook and Twitter to engage, develop relationships with and then compromise corporate employees. Through these victims, adversaries compromise the broader enterprises that employ them. McAfee predicts that such actors will seek to broaden the use of this attack vector in 2021 and beyond for a variety of reasons.  

Malicious actors have used the social network platforms in broad scoped schemes to perpetrate relatively low-level criminal scams. However, prominent actors such as APT34, Charming Kitten, and Threat Group-2889 (among others) have been identified using these platforms for higher-value, more targeted campaigns on the strength of the medium’s capacity for enabling customized content for specific types of victims.  

Operation North Star demonstrates a state-of-the-art attack of this kind. Discovered and exposed by McAfee in August 2020, the campaign showed how lax social media privacy controls, ease of development and use of fake LinkedIn user accounts and job descriptions could be used to lure and attack defense sector employees. 

Just as individuals and organizations engage potential consumer customers on social platforms by gathering information, developing specialized content, and conducting targeted interactions with customers, malicious actors can similarly use these platform attributes to target high value employees with a deeper level of engagement.  

Additionally, individual employees engage with social networks in a capacity that straddles both their professional and personal lives. While enterprises assert security controls over corporate-issued devices and place restrictions on how consumer devices access corporate IT assets, user activity on social network platforms is not monitored or controlled in the same way. As mentioned, LinkedIn and Twitter direct messaging will not be the only vectors of concern for the corporate security operations center (SOC). 

While it is unlikely that email will ever be replaced as an attack vector, McAfee foresees this social network platform vector becoming more common in 2021 and beyond, particularly among the most advanced actors. 

The post 2021 Threat Predictions Report appeared first on McAfee Blogs.

This post was also written by Darragh McMahon

At McAfee, we adhere to a set of core values and principles – We Put the Customer at The Core, We Achieve Excellence with Speed and Agility, We Play to Win or We Don’t Play, We Practice Inclusive Candor and Transparency.

And reaching the ISO 27701 enshrines all of these values.

For those who are not familiar with it, the ISO 27701 is the industry leading certification for information security & privacy management. Achieving the ISO 27701 certification demonstrates that McAfee is able to protect personal data, thanks to a multidisciplinary effort coupled with cross-functional expertise. Because yes, We Play to Win or We Don’t Play.

Over the past years, and all around the world, lawmakers and regulators have been and continue to introduce new laws governing the processing of personal data (such as those adopted in Australia, Brazil, Singapore and Canada) -the GDPR and the CCPA are only few of these. This changing legal environment raises challenges for all businesses, but especially those that must comply globally with regulations in multiple jurisdictions. Compliance to requirements and controls of ISO 27701 is relevant to support the fulfillment of obligations to articles 5 to 49 (except 43) of the GDPR. The application of the ISO 27701 standard can also be used for supporting compliance with other data privacy laws. Because yes, We Practice Inclusive Candor and Transparency.

The ISO 27701 Standard has been published in August 2019, and all companies, whether vendors or customers, should look into it. At the time of certification by McAfee’s assessment firm[1], McAfee is one of the very first companies to achieve the certification within the cyber-security industry. Because yes, not only do We Achieve Excellence with Speed and Agility, but We also Put the Customer at the Core.

Key requirements include, but are not limited to:

• Fundamental Data Protection Principles: purpose of the data processing, legal basis for the data processing, obtaining individuals’ consent and mechanisms to modify or withdraw that consent, records of data processing activities, and privacy impact assessments;
• Individuals’ Data Protection Rights: notice, access, correction, erasure, and automated decisions;
• Privacy by Design and by Default: data minimization, de-identification and deletion, and data retention;
• Data processing agreements, data transfers and data sharing;
• Determination of the role of the organization as a data controller and/or data processor;
• Unified management of IT risks for the organization of privacy risks for data subjects;
• Appointment of a person responsible for the protection of privacy (DPO or equivalent);
• Staff awareness; data classification; protection of removable media; user access management and data encryption; backups and event logging; conditions for the transfer of personal data; Incident management; and
• Compliance with legal and regulatory requirements, etc.

McAfee’s ISO 27701 certificate, along with its other certificates, is publicly available at trust.mcafee.com/privacy-compliance

[1] Schellman, December 2020

The post McAfee Welcomes its ISO 27701 Certificate! appeared first on McAfee Blogs.

XDR (eXtended Detection and Response) is a cybersecurity acronym being used by most vendors today.  It is not a new strategy. It’s been around for a while but the journey for customers and vendors has been slow for many reasons. For McAfee, XDR has been integral to our vision, strategy and design philosophy that has guided our solution development for many years. Understanding our road to XDR can help your organization map your XDR journey.

The Building Pressure for XDR

Let’s start with why XDR?  The cry for XDR reflects where cybersecurity is today with fragmented, cumbersome and ineffective security and where folks want to go.  In my CISO conversations it is well noted that security operation centers (SOC) are struggling.  Disjointed control points and disparate tools lead to ineffective security teams.  It allows adversaries to more easily move laterally across the infrastructure undetected and moving intentionally erratic to avoid detection.  Analysts only know this if they manually connect the thousand dots which is time consuming leaving the adversaries with ample dwell time to do damage. It’s no secret. There is a lack of security expertise, and these are regularly tested.  Their investigations are cumbersome, highly manual, and riddled with blind spots. It’s nearly impossible to prioritize efforts, leaving the SOC simply buried in reactive cycles and alert fatigue.  Bottom line—SOC metrics are getting worse—while adversaries are becoming more sophisticated and creative in carrying out their mission.

XDR has the potential to be a one-stop solution to alleviating these SOC issues and improving operational inefficiencies.

XDR Options

Many cybersecurity providers are trying to offer an XDR capability of some sort. They promise to provide visibility and control across all vectors, and offer more analysis, context and automation to obtain faster and better response when reacting to a threat. Point players are limited to expertise in their domain (endpoint or network) and can’t offer a critical, proven cross-portfolio platform. After all, can your endpoint platform offer true XDR functionality it it’s not also connected to network, cloud and web?

McAfee’s long-time mantra has been Better Together. That mantra underscores our commitment to deliver comprehensive security that works cohesively across all threat vectors – device, network, web and cloud and with non-McAfee products.  Industry analysts and customers agree that McAfee is well positioned to deliver a solid XDR offering given our platform strategy and portfolio.

There is more to the McAfee XDR Story

Now, what if you had that same comprehensive XDR capability that not only offered visibility and control across the vectors, but also allows you to get ahead of adversary and empowering you to be more proactive. It could give you a heads up on threats that are likely to attack you based on global and industry trends, based on what your local environment looks like. With this highly credible prediction comes the prescribed guidance on how to counter the threat before it hits you. Imagine it also supplies prescriptive actions you can take to protect your users, data, applications and devices spanning from device to cloud. Other XDR conversations can’t take the conversation to this level of proactivity. McAfee can in our recently announced MVISION XDR.

Not only does McAfee take XDR to the next level, but it also helps you better mitigate cyber risk by enabling you to prioritize and focus on what most matters. What if your threat response was prioritized based on the impact to the organization? You need to understand what the attackers are targeting. How close are they to the most sensitive data based on the users and devices? MVISION XDR offers this context and data-awareness to focus your analysts on what counts. For example, threats that jeopardize sensitive data from a finance executive on his device will automatically be of priority versus a maybe threat on general purpose device with no data. This data-awareness is not noted well in other XDR conversations, but it is with recently announced MVISION XDR.  

Let’s look at McAfee’s journey and investment with XDR and how we got to this exceptional XDR approach.

McAfee XDR Journey

McAfee’s XDR Journey did not simply start up recently because a buzz word appeared that needed to spoke to.   As noted earlier, McAfee’s mantra “Together is Better” sets the stage for a unified security approach, which is core to the XDR promise.  McAfee recognized early on that multi-vendors security ecosystem is a key requirement to build a defense in depth security practice. OpenDXL the open-source community delivered the data exchange layer or the DXL message bus architecture. This enabled our diverse ecosystem of partners from threat intelligence platforms, to orchestration tools to use a common transport mechanism and information exchange protocol. Most enterprise security architectures will be a heterogenous mix of various security solutions. McAfee is one of the founding members of the Open CyberSecurity Alliance (OCA) where we contributed our DXL ontology – enabling participating vendors to not only communicate vital threat details but inform what to do to all connected multi-vendor security solutions.

Realizing EDR is network blind and SIEM is endpoint blind, we integrated McAfee EDR and SIEM.  McAfee continues to deliver XDR capabilities by bringing multiple telemetry sources on a platform from a single console for analytics and investigation, driving remediation decisions with automatic enforcement across the enterprise.  When you combine  MVISION XDR the first proactive, data-aware and open XDR and released MVISION Marketplace and API further supporting the open security ecosystem for XDR capabilities, organizations have a solid starting point to advance their visibility and control across their entire cyber infrastructure.

Before all the XDR hype, McAfee customers have been on the XDR path. Our customers have already gained XDR capabilities and are positioned to grow with more XDR capabilities. I encourage you to check out the video below.

The post The Road to XDR appeared first on McAfee Blogs.

No doubt, we have a lot to be hopeful for as we step into the New Year. We’ve adapted, survived, and learned to thrive under extraordinary circumstances. While faced with plenty of challenges, families successfully transitioned to working and learning from home like pros. So, as we set our intentions for 2021, we will need that same resolve to tackle growing cyber threats.

The good news: With a COVID-19 vaccine making its debut, we’re trusting there’s an end in sight to the pandemic of 2020, which may help curb a lot of our emotional as well as digital stressors.

The not-so-good-news: According to McAfee’s latest Quarterly Threat Report, pandemic-themed threats that began in 2020 will continue, specifically, phishing and malware scams targeting people working from home. According to the recent report, bad actors are especially taking advantage of the mass remote workforces.

According to Raj Samani, McAfee Fellow and Chief Scientist, “What began as a trickle of phishing campaigns and the occasional malicious app quickly turned into a deluge of malicious URLs, attacks on cloud users and capable threat actors leveraging the world’s thirst for more information on COVID-19 as an entry mechanism into systems across the globe.”

This report points inspires a few best practices for families as we launch a new year: Stay informed and keep talking about the threats and — as grandma might advise — dress in layers to protect against the elements (in this case, digital threats).

Safe Family Tips

1. Information is power.The best defense against online threats is a good offense, which is the digital space means staying informed. The more you know about how hackers exploit consumers, the more you can dodge shady phishing scams such as emails trying to sell you the COVID-19 vaccine online or a voucher allowing you to skip the vaccination line.
2. Verify email sources.Be skeptical of emails or text messages claiming to be from people you know or organizations with requests or offers that seem too good to be true. Before you click, go straight to the organization’s website or contact customer service. Verifying sources will help you steer clear of downloading malicious content from phishing links. Remind family members to keep their guards up and never to share personal information.
3. Hover over links, scrutinize URLs.If someone sends you a message with a link, hover over the link without clicking on it. This will allow you to see a link preview. If the URL looks suspicious, delete the message. A few red flags: Fake links generally imitate established websites but may include unnecessary words and domains in the address. When in doubt about a link’s validity — don’t click.
4. Think in layers.When it comes to cybersecurity for the new year, try thinking (or dressing) your devices in layers. A few ways to layer up:

• Use 2FA passwords. Regularly changing passwords and adding two-factor authentication (2FA) is proving to be the most effective way to thwart hackers. If you work from home, 2FA is a more secure way to access work applications. This password/username combo requires you to verify who you are with a personal device only you own puts an extra barrier between your data and a creative hacker.

• Use a VPN. If you travel or choose to work in a coffee shop, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) will give your family an encrypted channel that shields your online activity from hackers.

• Security software. If you’ve been cobbling your security plan together, consider one comprehensive security solution to help protect you from malware, phishing attacks, and viruses. Leading products such as McAfee Total protection will include safe browsing and a VPN.

The past year, while difficult, also gave us several gifts to carry into 2021. For families, it connected us with our resilience and creativity. It made us wiser, braver, and more ready for the challenges ahead, be they online or within the ebb and flow of everyday life. That’s something we can all celebrate.

The post 4 Ways to Help Your Family Combat Cyber Threats in the New Year appeared first on McAfee Blogs.

With 2021 approaching, it is a time to both reflect on the outstanding progress we have each made – personally and professionally, and warmly welcome a new chapter in 2021!  

2020 has been one of the most unexpected years in our history. However, despite COVID-19, we had some amazing successes. 

January brought McAfee our new CEO – Peter Leav. It’s hard to believe it has only been a year under his leadership. What an impact! And, McAfee is back on the stock exchange.   

2020 has also seen the rapid acceleration of cloud adoption. Typically, a move like that involves immense planning to minimize complexity. That didn’t always happen.  And, as our Advanced Threat Research team has reported, cybercriminals took full advantage of more ransomware, malware, and general bad behavior. In fact, a recent McAfee report estimates global cybercrime losses will exceed $1 Trillion.  Fortunately, McAfee customers benefited from the get-go with a robust, award-winning cloud-native portfolio that became even stronger in 2020.   

Excelling at Cloud Security with SASE and CNAPP 

Shortly after Peter joined, we closed our LightPoint Acquisition, enabling us to add Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) to MVISION Unified Cloud Edge (UCE). In March, we delivered multi-vector data protection for unified and comprehensive data protection across endpoints, web, and cloud. In August, we further enhanced our MVISION UCE offering by announcing pivotal SD-WAN Technology integrations. Finally, at MPOWER, we announced the industry first integration of Remote Browser Isolation into our Unified Cloud Edge solution.  

To our award-winning and unmatched MVISION Cloud solution which is natively integrated into UCE, we were the first CASB to map cloud threats to MITRE ATT&CK. Introducing MITRE ATT&CK into the MVISION Cloud workflow helps SOC analysts to investigate cloud threats and security managers defend against future attacks with increased precision. Our new MVISION Cloud Security Advisor (CSA) – provides recommendations – broken into visibility and control metrics – to help prioritize cloud security controls implementation.  We also delivered MVISION Cloud for Teams, which provides policy and collaboration controls to enable organizations to safely collaborate with partners without having to worry about exposing confidential data to guest users.   

MVISION Cloud received its FedRAMP High JAB P-ATO designation and McAfee MVISION for Endpoint achieved FedRAMP Moderate Authorization. Both of those are important to enable our Federal customers to take advantage of the MVISION portfolio.  

All of this helps our customers accelerate the easy adoption of a more complete Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture and better defend against advanced web and cloud-based threats. In fact, our MVISION UCE customers can enjoy a nearly 40% annual TCO savings when they go from on-prem to cloud. 

For our customers who want cloud native IaaS security while dealing existing on-prem data center deployments, we rolled out our new McAfee MVISION Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), an integrated hybrid cloud security platform for comprehensive data protection, threat prevention, governance, and compliance for the cloud-native application lifecycle. We also announced native AWS Integrations for MVISION CNAPP.  

Delivering a future proof SOC with XDR  

The team and I are also extremely excited about the progress with our Endpoint portfolio across ENS, EDR and momentum behind MVISION Insights.  

The still unfolding SolarWinds supply chain compromise has shown how unprepared SOC teams can be and why it is ever more important to have proactive and actionable threat intelligence at your fingertips. As news of an emerging campaign becomes viral, SOC teams must answer the topical question raised by the C-level or the Board “Are we impacted” which unfortunately till now took weeks if not days of scrambling to answer. We launched MVISION Insights early this summer to solve for exactly this problem. MVISION Insights leverages McAfee’s cutting-edge threat research, augmented with AI applied to real-time telemetry streamed from over a Billion sensors to identify and prioritize threats, before they hit. MVISION Insights can predict the impact on your countermeasures, and then tells you exactly how and where to improve your security posture. In essence, it enables you to “shift left” and anticipate and stop breaches before they happen. As the SolarWinds compromise was unfolding, MVISION Insights delivered actionable threat intelligence to McAfee’s customers within hours. The fact that we now have hundreds of customers who have adopted MVISION Insights as part of their SOC framework within a few months of release is a testament to the real value add they are enjoying. Best part is that it is also free for all our customers who have our integrated EPP+EDR SKUs: MV6 or MV7. 

Our latest Endpoint protection product, ENS 10.7, is stronger with the highest quality and customer satisfaction than ever. ENS 10.7 couples all our endpoint protection capabilities with machine learning, behavior monitoring, fileless threat defense and Rollback Remediation. It’s also backed by our Global Threat Intelligence (GTI) to provide adaptable, defense in depth capability against the techniques used in targeted ransomware attacks. ENS 10.7 delivers meaningful value. Rollback Remediation, for instance, can save an average $500 per node in labor and productivity costs by eliminating need to reimage machines. ENS 10.7 became generally available about a year ago and has emerged as our #1 deployed enterprise product worldwide – the fastest ramp of any ENS release. 

Equally on the EDR front, we delivered capabilities that make a measurable improvement for the ever tired SOC teams. The included AI Guided investigations can speed threat investigations from greater than 2 hours to as little as 6 minutes per incident. The SolarWinds compromise also showed that Organizations need an integrated platform that delivers complete visibility and control across their infrastructure including their supply chain. The recently announced MVISION XDR builds upon our EDR solution making it easier for our customers to achieve this complete visibility and control. It extends MVISION Insights across endpoints, network and cloud, making it the first proactive XDR platform to manage your risk. MVISION XDR dramatically expands the capabilities of traditional Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) point solutions by delivering a fully integrated, SaaS-based platform to rapidly discover and mitigate the real threats to your users and data across all threat vectors.  And, complementing our MVSION XDR solution is a host of partner solutions available via MVISION Marketplace.  

Finally, we rolled out the Device-to-Cloud suites, making it easier for our customers to move to a cloud-native architecture. These three SaaS offerings all feature MVISION Insights and endpoint protection to provide right-sized security solutions in a simple-to-acquire package.  

I am so proud that our customers and the industry also recognize the McAfee teams’ hard work. We were able to add a long list of awards and accolades to our portfolio in 2020. 

Now that we’ve looked back at our successes, let’s take a moment to look forward and set goals for ourselves in the coming year. My team and I are committed to:  

• Expanding on our XDR strategy by changing the landscape of how we enable our customers to being more proactive and get complete visibility and control halting threats before they reach devices, networks, and the cloud.  
• Strengthening UCE by innovating and expanding our portfolio features and functionality to enable comprehensive Zero Trust and SASE coverage from McAfee that spans all major threat vectors.   
• Raising the bar of MVISION CNAPP innovation and making it easier (and safer) to accelerate cloud transitions with continued cloud security innovation.  

Against today’s increasingly sophisticated adversaries, your success is our success.    

As we head into 2021, I want to take a moment to wish each of you peace, good health, and prosperity.   

Happy holidays to you and yours! 

Thanks, Shishir 

The post Bring on 2021! appeared first on McAfee Blogs.

Looking Ahead to 2021: The Things We’ll Carry Forward

Right now, I’m thinking about how my life changed in 2020. Not so much in the sweeping and upending ways. More in the little ways. I’m thinking about the coping ways. The cobble-it-all-together ways. The little changes to make things work ways. There were plenty.  Now, with the first doses of vaccine going to those who need it most, I find myself wondering which of those little changes from 2020 will carry over into post-pandemic days.

One thing I do know, central to many of those changes was the internet.

The little things meant a lot

For starters, I now have a chocolatier in my home. That’s courtesy of the online Master Classes my husband  and I took—his course of study being chocolate making. (We’ll see how he tops that in 2021. Chocolate sets a pretty high bar.) Would we have taken our respective classes otherwise? Hard to say. But I will say this—it was a comfort.

I know that ordering my mother’s groceries online so she could avoid going into the store and stay safe was new. And through working online, I feel like I got invited into my team members’ homes where I had the pleasure of meeting  their spouses, children and pets. Also, while I could not travel like I wanted to, I could still go exploring with virtual tours of the world’s great museums plus catch a few great dive sites without getting wet. Those were all unique to 2020 as well.

I count myself fortunate that I had those options available to me, as many people simply did not—whether because a lack of connectivity held them back, or their working situations simply could not make the jump to online. With that, I think of the essential workers, the first responders, the medical professionals of all walks, and the people who kept our communities going by being on the front lines of this pandemic. We all owe them so much, both now and moving forward.

The internet helped us live our lives in 2020

Yet where possible, the internet responded, in the best way that it could. For those of us who saw our work, studies, and livelihoods shift online, the internet proved that it could step in. It’s been far from ideal, of course. The internet is simply no substitute for us working and being together, yet it helped so many of us face the challenges of 2020. Even if we didn’t use the internet for work or school, it helped us find employment, get care by way of telemedicine, and keep in touch thanks to free video conferencing, just to name a few things.

Put plainly, the internet helped us live our lives this year. And out of necessity, it re-shaped the way we live our lives too. So, without question, I can see some of little changes I made carrying over. My husband and I will take more Master Classes. I like the idea of helping my mom with the shopping when I can’t be with her. And I’ll keep exploring, even while that means restricting it to online for now. I’m sure you can count think of a few examples of your own too—things that made your life a little better this year and that can make the years to come better too.

Some of the big changes ahead in 2021

Looking beyond my own homestead, I’m hoping that 2021 will prompt broader, and immensely positive, changes as part of lessons learned from 2020.

With regards to internet access, this year has underscored the internet’s role as an essential utility. It’s no longer a luxury. I predict we’ll see renewed energy in public and private partnerships that will connect more people to fixed broadband internet connections so that they can benefit from the same professional, educational, and personal opportunities that the rest of us on broadband already enjoy.

During the election year here in the U.S., there’s been plenty of conversation about the propagation of disinformation and misinformation on the internet, both by bad actors and by the unwitting parties who fall prey to their falsehoods. We covered the topic extensively in our election blogs, and I believe the ability to critically assess what we see and read on the internet is a major issue of our time, whether it’s an election year or not. Disinformation and misinformation online are here to stay, and there’s an opportunity for schools to introduce instruction on smart media consumption as part of their curriculums.

And, what about working from home? Will it become a new norm for business in some shape or other? Working from home remains a complicated conversation, as a mix of public health concerns, local mandates, and stark financial realities drove that shift to remote workforces in the first place. Now, similar questions arise as communities and economies recover. Companies will make strategic decisions about their properties, people, and how they all work together—not to mention how they ensure personal and corporate security in a remote workplace setting. If we use major outdoor retailer REI as one example, we’ll see that the answers are nuanced—particularly when the end result means selling a newly built and never-used corporate headquarters like REI did.

A stronger and greater 2021

To bring it all back home, let’s see what’s worth carrying forward into 2021. We learned a multitude of hard lessons in 2020, and we pulled off plenty of clever moves in response. As much as we’d like to put 2020 behind us, let’s take a moment to pause and consider where some of the silver linings were and see if we can spin them into something stronger and greater in 2021.

And on a personal note I would like to end 2020 and start 2021 expressing my gratitude for the frontline workers, teachers and humanitarians who place service to society above all else. We have heroes in our midst and that is something to celebrate!

Happy New Year!

Stay Updated 

To stay updated on all things McAfee and for more resources on staying secure from home, follow @McAfee_Home on Twitter, listen to our podcast Hackable?, and ‘Like’ us on Facebook.

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On December 13, 2020, FireEye announced that threat actors had compromised SolarWinds’s Orion IT monitoring and management software and used it to distribute a software backdoor to dozens of that company’s customers, including several high profile U.S. government agencies.

Game Changing Attack Vector

This campaign is the first major supply chain attack of its kind at scale and represents a shift in tactics where a nation state has employed a new weapon for cyber-espionage.  Just as the use of nuclear weapons at the end of WWII changed military strategy for the next 75 years, the use of a supply chain attack will change the way we need to consider defense against cyber-attacks.

This supply chain attack operated at the scale of a worm such as WannaCry in 2017, combined with the precision and lethality of the 2014 Sony Pictures or 2015 U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) attacks.

The impact of this attack shows how a high-volume commercial software product can impact many organizations simultaneously. In the past, cyber-attacks such as WannaCry relied on vulnerabilities, exploiting organizations that failed to install critical patches. In the case of SolarWinds-SUNBURST, any organization that simply updated its software could be vulnerable to attack, which is why we saw the impact across multiple agencies in the federal government and private sector.  Furthermore, the backdoor used stealth tactics to monitor if it was being analyzed by looking for the presence of debuggers and network monitors and suppressing communications and alerts of other malicious behavior in those scenarios.

Broad Reach and Impact

From a U.S. national security perspective, this attack enables the nation’s enemies to steal all manner of information, from inter-governmental communications to national secrets. Attackers can, in turn, leverage this information to influence or impact U.S. policy through malicious leaks.

The attack impacted private companies as well. Unlike government networks which isolate classified information both from the internet and non-classified material, private organizations often have critical intellectual property on the same internet-facing network they store non sensitive information.  Exactly what corporate intellectual property or private data on employees has been stolen will be difficult to determine, and the full extent of theft may never be fully known.

These cyber supply chain attacks are a concern for consumers as well. In today’s highly interconnected homes, a breach of consumer electronics companies can result in attackers using their access to smart appliances such as TVs, virtual assistants, and smart phones to steal their information or act as a gateway to attack businesses while users are working remotely from home.

Endless Possibilities for Attackers

What makes this campaign so insidious is that the attackers used trusted SolarWinds software to infiltrate victim organizations with the SUNBURST backdoor, which then enabled the attacker to take any number of secondary steps. This could involve stealing data, destroying data, holding critical systems for ransom, orchestrating system malfunctions that could result in kinetic damage, or simply implanting additional malicious content throughout the organization to stay in control and maintain access even after the initial threat appears to have passed.

Encourages the Wrong Behavior

Such an attack is particularly challenging in that it raises concerns around best practices cybersecurity professionals have been trying to communicate for years. For decades, we have been saying that it is critical to patch and keep software updated. In this case, however, it was patching and bringing new software into an environment that opened organizations up to attack.

Organizations must not read into these SolarWinds-SUNBURST revelations that they should not prioritize keeping their environments up to date. Doing so would certainly open them up to a variety of other attacks.

How do we reconcile these two conflicting security viewpoints? Organizations and cybersecurity practitioners must be vigilant in their review and understanding of the software being brought into their environments. Additionally, they must identify their most critical information and data and apply the principles of least privilege to these items, ensuring that sensitive information such as national secrets and intellectual property are protected.

Daisy Chained Victims Amplify Impact

One additional area of concern is when software vendors are impacted.  In this scenario, it is possible for there to be a daisy chain effect. The adversary could modify either source code or a development toolchain within a victim’s environment to plant additional backdoors that are then distributed to their customers.

Conclusion and More Information

The SolarWinds-SUNBURST campaign is like a “smart bomb” on a crowded landscape of “dumb bomb” cyber threats. WannaCry was a dumb bomb in that it was fully autonomous and indiscriminate in what it attacked. Whereas this SolarWinds-SUNBURST attack is a “precision guided” smart cyber weapon that is being used to target specific organizations in very specific ways. Every organization that is of interest to the attacker might be targeted slightly differently.

McAfee has incorporated technical indicators gleaned from the FireEye and SolarWinds incidents into our cyber defenses and solutions portfolio to protect our environment and customers. The details of these supplemental protections can be found in McAfee’s knowledge base (KB) articles KB89830 and KB93861.

Please also see the following analysis blogs focused on SolarWinds-SUNBURST:

• How A Device to Cloud Architecture Defends Against the SolarWinds Supply Chain Compromise
• Additional Analysis into the SUNBURST Backdoor
• SUNBURST Malware and SolarWinds Supply Chain Compromise

The post Why SolarWinds-SUNBURST is a Wake up Call appeared first on McAfee Blogs.

McAfee, the device-to-cloud cybersecurity company, announced the winners of its distinguished SIA Partner Awards. The 2020 awards recognize partners who demonstrated innovation, strategic value, and market leadership in their respective market segments which are a complement to the McAfee solution portfolio.

2020 has been a difficult year for everyone that has required organizations to be flexible and rethink how they deploy security to ensure their critical assets remain protected. The McAfee SIA program enables organizations to embrace the flexibility they need through certified integrated solutions from industry-leading providers to ensure they have the tools and resources needed to stay protected and ensure business keeps operating.

We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2020 McAfee Security Innovation Alliance Awards in the following three categories: Most Innovative Partners of the Year, and SIA Partner of the Year.

Most Innovative Partner of the Year: IBM Security

IBM Security is a strategic partnered with McAfee across multiple IBM teams including Resilient and QRadar. To date McAfee has certified integrations with IBM’s Incident Response platform, Resilient to include: TIE, DXL, ePO, ESM, ATD and now MVISION. McAfee has released QRadar integrations to both ePO and MVISION. All McAfee Resilient integrations are published on IBM’s AppExchange. In 2019 McAfee and IBM jointly founded the Open Cybersecurity Alliance under the auspices of Oasis. Read our  solution brief for more details. IBM Security was amongst the inaugural partners announced during the recent launch of the MVISION Marketplace.

Most Innovative Partner of the Year: Siemplify

Siemplify is a great McAfee partner, previously integrating their SOAR product with McAfee ePO. Now, with McAfee’s latest announcement of the MVISION Marketplace including Siemplify as one of the inaugural development partners. Siemplify has shown themselves to be one of our most innovative partners during 2020 and now enable mutual customers to discover, try, buy, and deploy partner technologies as a Composable solution with a few clicks of the mouse.

SIA Partner of the Year 2020 : ThreatQuotient

Most Valuable Partner of the Year criteria cover the breadth and depth of the partner’s multiple integrations and close business engagement with McAfee.

ThreatQuotient, “ThreatQ” Joined the SIA program in January 2017 and quickly showed their value through their Threat Intelligence Platform. In ThreatQ fashion, they quickly, integrated with McAfee TIE, McAfee Data Exchange Layer (DXL), McAfee Advanced Threat Detection (ATD), McAfee Active Response (MAR) and Enterprise Security Manager (ESM), followed by MVISION Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR). Most recently ThreatQ was amongst the inaugural partners to launch with McAfee’s new MVISION Marketplace.

Partnership integrations and the most deal closures within the SIA programs tells the story or why ThreatQuotient was selected as the Partner of The Year.

To learn more about these partners and MVISION Marketplace visit: https://marketplace.mcafee.com

Read the MVISION Marketplace press release here: McAfee Announces MVISION Marketplace

The post McAfee Security Innovation Alliance 2020 MPOWER Awards appeared first on McAfee Blogs.

2020 has been quite the year for many, and through it all, we’re reflecting on everything we are thankful for. This includes the incredible stories and invaluable perspectives that come from our McAfee team members around the world.

As the year ends, we’re counting down the top 10 most read Life at McAfee blog stories. These are the stories from our team members that you love to read, and we love to tell!   

10. One Team Member Selflessly Provides Relief to Covid 19’s Front Line 

When COVID-19 hit Germany, Heiko jumped into action and made an impact on his community with the help of THW and McAfee’s Volunteer Time Off (VTO) benefit. Read about Heiko’s experience and how he was able to help provide relief by helping to build a temporary hospital facility. 

9. How to Adopt a Work-From-Home Mindset 

Navigating a global pandemic while balancing parenthood and adjusting to remote work is currently a challenge for many. In this blog, our team member, Paige, offers up four helpful tips for remote working parents. 

 8. McAfee Men Share Fresh Perspectives on Gender Equality

In honor of International Women’s Day, we asked McAfee men around the world to share their perspectives on creating a more gender equal world. They offered candid and rich insights with takeaways to remember — inside and outside of the workplace. If you’re looking for an interesting conversation on gender equality, you won’t want to miss this blog. 

7. McAfee’s Women in Security Offer New Grads Career Insights

Launching your career is an exciting experience that can also be a nerve-wracking feat. Our Women in Security (WISE) Community hosted a panel discussion to encourage our next generation of women in tech to pursue their passions. Whether you’re just starting your career or looking for a change, you’ll find useful insights on what it’s like to work in the tech industry and life at McAfee!  

6. Spotlighting McAfee’s Women in Technology Scholarship Recipients

We talked to our Women in Technology (WIT) Scholarship recipients and discussed their participation in our summer internship program in Cork, Ireland. Read about their unique experiences being in the program — from building professional relationships to mentorships and training. This is a valuable read for anyone jumpstarting a new career.

5. What is a McAfee Internship Like? 10 Interns Share Perspectives 

Looking for a snapshot of McAfee internships? To celebrate National Intern Day, we asked  ten global McAfee interns to share insights gained from their unique experiences. 

4. Honoring Our Brave Military Veterans from the McAfee Community 

 To pay tribute to our veterans in honor of Veterans Day and Remembrance Day, we asked team members in our McAfee Veterans Community to share memories and photos from their service days. Check out what some of them had to say! 

3. How One McAfee Advanced Threat Researcher is Giving Back During Covid-19 

Meet Thomas, Advanced threat Researcher at McAfee by day, 3D–mask–printing expert by night. Read Thomas’ story and find out how he is making a significant impact and inspiring others to support healthcare workers during the pandemic. 

2. Women in Sales Part 1: Opportunities for Women Across Cybersecurity Sales 

In our Women in Sales series, McAfee’s sales professionals talked on how to break boundaries and achieve success in cybersecurity sales. If you want to dive into industry opportunities and gain advice to advance your career, this is the place to start!

1. Five Tips from McAfee’s Remote Workers

Whether you’re an expert in remote work or working from home for the first time, you may be looking for helpful tips to set yourself up for success. In this blog, get advice from seasoned remote workers on navigating working from home and learn how you can incorporate practical tips.  

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