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Comment by howlgarnish | Hacker News Reader

McAfee, the marketing nightmare that just keeps on giving. I genuinely don't understand why McAfee the company hasn't changed its name yet.

In the meantime, some greatest hits:

How to Uninstall McAfee (NSFW-ish) https://youtu.be/bKgf5PaBzyg

The McAfee guide to bribery in the third world http://www.whoismcafee.com/the-travel-guide/

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McAfee, like Symantec, has a Compliance driven sales cycle. No one likes the software, few think it's useful, but businesses must buy it due to their regulatory burdens.

The name doesn't matter. The marketing doesn't matter. The features don't matter. The performance doesn't matter. Laws and Industry Groups matter.

Perhaps there is a market for antivirus software that literally does nothing.

- Enterprise ready - runs on premise

- Vastly faster than the competition

- Huge profit margins due to minimized developer costs

A bit like http://vanilla-js.com the Javascript framework of 0 bytes (25 bytes compressed), but that antivirus would have the upside of having exactly 0 added risk, which distinguishes it from the rest of its industry.

That's true. Compliance - we went with clamav for what we do - it was easy to set up on cloud.

Compliance to what? I’m genuinely curious about who would mandate antivirus.

Even for smaller companies, when doing financial audit (required by law in many places) - consultant firms do highly encourage use of “endpoint protection across organization”. So in case of some IT screwup and financial losses, the auditors can say- “Well, they had Industry standard antivirus, so this shouldn’t have happened. Our financial risk assesment was still correct.”

ISO 27001 specifically mentions it

Any regulated industry where money or lives are at stake. An example is finance where regulations specifically state that you must have antivirus installed, even on servers.

Doesn't Defender qualify as satisfying the regulatory burden?

what class software as antivirus for the legislator?

PCI-DSS pretty much requires a malware protection solution. In practice - an antivirus.

Why Not Windows Defender? It’s really quite competent and it’s pretty lightweight.

That is just fine for PCI-DSS. Not a problem at all.

The "How to Uninstall McAfee" video is amazing; it is also pretty NSFW for anyone considering clicking on it at work.

Apparently the woman giving him a lap dance/walking away with him in the end is his wife.

For a short period they actually looked like they were rebranding as Intel security. All their material stopped actually saying "McAfee". Intel selling them off again put a stop to that.

The other branding issue is no-one seems capable of spelling McAfee. In the last thread on John, multiple people referred to "mcaffee", something I regularly see from their own sales people.

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