McAfee

John McAfee, the flamboyant anti-virus software industry pioneer, made a surprise appearance at a computer hackers' conference last Friday evening, where he unveiled a new website to give people a place online to vent their anger.

The one-time millionaire, who fled the Central American nation of Belize in 2012 after police sought to question him about the murder of a neighbor, said he set up the site for ordinary people to lodge complaints on anything from government corruption to bad consumer products.

 Intel last week said it will ditch the venerable McAfee brand for its security products and services, and offer free mobile security software to customers running Android, iOS, and other operating systems on their smartphones and tablets.

The company announced both moves at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the massive trade show that ran last week in Las Vegas.

Part-time fugitive and antivirus software founder John McAfee has a new invention he's working on. After spending some of his time filming a drug-fueled video tutorial to uninstall the antivirus program he helped create, McAfee now believes he can outsmart the NSA. Speaking at the C2SV Technology Conference on Saturday, McAfee unveiled his grand plan to create a "D-Central" gadget that communicates with smartphones, tablets, and laptops to create decentralized networks that can't be accessed by government agencies.

Mike Fey, global chief technology officer at security software company McAfee, has retracted the company's claims that pinned worldwide losses from cyber crime at more than $1tn, adding that supposedly more conservative (gu)estimates were also "hard for me to swallow".

"I wish we had never put a dollar figure on it," Fey told the Australian Financial Review. "[It is] very scary to just latch onto the number."

The chances were always slim that antivirus founder John McAfee would return to his former mansion in Belize and now he can’t. Last Thursday it burned down, more evidence according to McAfee, that he’s no longer welcome in the country.

In a blog, McAfee claimed that the destruction of his beautiful waterside Shangri-La amidst the palm trees was arson motivated by anger at the acquittal of some of his employees over unspecified charges related to their time working for him.

McAfee said it has found a vulnerability in Adobe Systems' Reader program that reveals when and where a PDF document is opened.

The issue is not a serious problem and does not allow for remote code execution, wrote McAfee's Haifei Li in a blog post. But McAfee does consider it a security problem and has notified Adobe. It affects every version of Adobe Reader, including the latest version, 11.0.2, Li wrote.

McAfee is sprucing up its cloud security portfolio with a couple of products from its parent company, Intel.

For starters, Intel is adding single sign-on and one-time password solutions that were previously sold and developed by Intel to its portfolio.

Reintroduced as the SaaS-based McAfee Single Sign On solution, the feature includes unlimited SSO connectors, built-in multi-factor authetnication, hybrid deployments (i.e. on-premise, SaaS or both), and 24-hour customer support. Pricing ranges from $1 to $5 per user based on the number of users/seats.

McAfee today announced that it has delivered the industry’s first ever whitelisting security solution for Android based embedded systems. McAfee Application Control for Android is the only security solution that resides in the Android kernel, embedded in the operating system. McAfee provides protection from the installation or execution of a malicious application on an Android-based device. McAfee also provides protection at the application layer to Android devices.

Financial services has been a favorite target for sophisticated attacks in the last few years, but cyber criminals are moving on to other "critical sectors of the economy," according to McAfee.

In the security giant's fourth quarter threats report, researchers highlighted some of the new schemes being used in this regard and other high-profile attacks, including advanced persistent threats (APTs) such as Operation High Roller and Project Blitzkrieg.

The recent actions of security software icon John McAfee may have seemed off kilter, but he now says that at least some of that was a ruse.

McAfee, speaking with ABC News after arriving in the U.S., said he faked illness to avoid being sent back to Belize from Guatemala. He also thanked the media for closely covering his story.

"It was a deception, but who did it hurt? I look pretty healthy, don't I?," he said during an interview with ABC at a Miami Beach hotel. He added: