McAfee

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McAfee, LLC

logo
legal form Limited Liability Company
founding 1987
Seat Santa Clara , California , USA
management Chris Young
Number of employees 7,500 (2015)
sales $ 2.065 billion (2010)
Branch Software development
Website www.mcafee.com

McAfee [ ˈmækəfiː ] is an American manufacturer of antivirus , network , and computer security software and hardware. The company is owned by the financial investors TPG and Thoma Bravo (51%) and Intel (49%). McAfee is named after its founder, John McAfee , and is headquartered in Santa Clara , Silicon Valley , California .

history

Former logo
Short term old logo

The company was founded in 1987 as McAfee Associates .

In 1992, 300 of the 500 largest American companies bought McAfee licenses, with which McAfee, unlike the anti-virus program offered as shareware for private users, made good business.

In 1994 McAfee went public.

In 1996, John McAfee sold the last of the shares in the company. The company's net worth was estimated at $ 100 million.

In 1997, McAfee merged with Network General to form Network Associates (NAI). After another restructuring and focus on the network security business , the company was renamed back to McAfee , until then this name had only been used as a product name. Other parts of the company, e.g. B. Sniffer technology, were spun off in this context and found a place in a company with the old name Network General .

After approval by the competition authorities (subject to conditions), McAfee was acquired by Intel in 2011 for a purchase price of 6.7 billion US dollars.

In early 2014, Intel announced that it would discontinue the McAfee brand by the end of the year and name it in Intel Security , but this was never enforced. Instead, only the McAfee logo was temporarily changed by adding a small Intel Security logo.

In September 2016, Intel announced that it would sell 51% of the shares in the financial investor TPG for 3.1 billion US dollars. Since April 4, 2017, McAfee has been operating as an independent company again and trading as McAfee (LLC) again. Intel retains 49% of the shares, while TPG and the private equity company Thoma Bravo have a minority stake in the remaining 51%.

Well-known products of the company for private users include McAfee Antivirus Plus , Nuts & Bolts (utility program package), McAfee LiveSafe and McAfee Total Protection.

Problem

PGP was bought by NAI (McAfee) in 1997 and integrated into their own product line. Due to the fact that the source code of PGP was temporarily not disclosed by McAfee and features were implemented that enable automatic encryption to another recipient (Additional Decryption Key ADK), PGP has come under heavy criticism at this time. In 2002 McAfee gave up the PGP brand. The OpenPGP standard was developed by 1998, not least because of the non-transparent situation during the time when PGP was owned by McAfee .

Thanks to a deal with Adobe , the in-house anti-virus program was installed with every download of Adobe Flash Player . As a result, McAfee achieved a high number of users, but was subsequently classified as pup (Probably Unwanted Software) by other antivirus programs .

In 2013, John McAfee published a video with almost 10 million clicks in which he ironically explains how to uninstall the software.

Individual evidence

  1. home.mcafee.com
  2. mcafee.com
  3. McAfee to lay off small amount off staff ( Memento from January 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) In: techeye.net
  4. Mcafee, Inc. In: hotstocked.com
  5. a b c Suspicion against John McAfee: From virus hunter to hunted. In: Spiegel Online. Retrieved April 23, 2017 .
  6. EU Commission demands concessions from Intel for McAfee takeover. In: Heise . January 26, 2011, accessed January 27, 2011 .
  7. Intel Annual Financial Statements 2012. ( Memento of the original from September 26, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: intc.com , accessed on May 14, 2014 (PDF). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.intc.com
  8. Intel lets the brand "McAfee" fall asleep. In: Heise Online. January 7, 2014, accessed May 14, 2014 .
  9. Intel sells majority to IT security division. In: reuters.com
  10. ^ TPG Acquires a Majority Stake in McAfee. In: tpg.com , accessed April 4, 2017 (English)
  11. Ralf Bendrath: PGP - the first ten years. Retrieved January 19, 2020 .