[June 05, 2008]

McAfee's Intros New Security Products, Releases List of Dangerous Top Level Domains

By Rajani Baburajan

TMCnet Contributing Editor

McAfee (News - Alert) is now offering two new products, McAfee Policy Auditor 5.0 and McAfee Encrypted USB, to ensure endpoint protection of data.

McAfee Policy Auditor 5.0 is part of the company’s ePolicy Orchestrator and will make it easier to provide an audit trail when something goes wrong. McAfee Encrypted USB is a new type of USB drive designed to prevent data loss.

In addition to the two new products, McAfee also released a report on the most dangerous top level domains (TLDs).

McAfee ePolicy Auditor 5.0 works with McAfee's ePolicy Orchestrator, which is used in all McAfee's products, including its flagship antivirus product. ePolicy Auditor 5.0 uses security standards like Extensible Configuration Checklist Description Format (XCCDF) and Open Vulnerability Assessment Language (OVAL).

Chris Parkerson, group solution marketing manager for data protection at McAfee, pointed out that conventional data loss prevention tools secure the network, but not the end points that are more vulnerable to data loss. The audit is done after a data breach, so there is no trail to show that the laptop has been secured.

ePolicy Auditor 5.0 audits the computer, especially laptops, to check what security measures have been taken on the endpoint device and runs on the clients and sends report to ePolicy Orchestrator. If there is a problem, there is an audit trail of proof that the computer/laptop has been secured with drive encryption, two-factor authentication, or data backup.

McAfee Encrypted USB marks McAfee’s entry to the hardware market. The new USB flash and hard drives with special security authentication were developed by SafeBoot. McAfee had acquired SafeBoot last year, when the development of Encrypted USB was going on.

McAfee Encrypted USB drives are USB 2.0-compatible with AES

256 security and the capability of two-factor encryption that can include RSA tokens or biometric security in addition to passwords. It will also support external USB hard drives in 250GB, 500GB and 750GB, offering the same two-factor security

"This is targeted at users who need to use USB drives, who need the portability, but you want to protect it so if the device goes missing, the information on it is useless because it's all encrypted," said Parkerson in a statement.

Along with the two new security products, McAfee also released a new report "Mapping the Mal Web Revisited," a look at 9.9 million Web sites in 265 dangerous TLDs. The report found that 19.2 percent of all .hk Web sites, the Hong Kong TLD, posed some kind of security threat to users. Next to Hong Kong was .cn TLD, which belongs to mainland China. About 11 percent of domains of .cn TLD carried infection. Globally China had almost 30 percent of infected Web sites.

The main reason behind the security threat in .hk Web sites is cited as the lack of sophisticated security technology. Moreover, in China, domain registration is extremely cheap and hackers are encouraged to launch their Web sites with the least investment.

The top domains ranked in terms of the prevalence of dangerous downloads are .info, the generic information domain, with 21.95 percent, .hk at 19.2 percent, Russia's .ro at 14.18 percent, Samoa's .ws at 12.5 percent, the business domain .biz at 11.64 percent, and .cn at 10.75 percent.

Last year’s worst offender TLD, Tokelau (.tk) — the domain of a tiny island in South Pacific- improved drastically. It is now moved from first place to 28 out of 74 after revising its policy to allow unlimited, free, anonymous registration of .tk domains.

Rajani Baburajan is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Rajani’s articles, please visit her columnist page.

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