Against the backdrop of its reported preparations to go public, McAfee LLC today introduced a new threat intelligence service that allows enterprises to gain advanced knowledge of potential attacks against their systems.

Mvision Insights taps into data the company collects from customer installations of its cybersecurity software. According to McAfee, it has more than a billion virtual “sensors” running on devices worldwide that gather intelligence about malware infections and other types of cyberattacks.

Mvision Insights makes this information available in a form that enterprise security teams can work with. The service surfaces hacking campaigns in a firm’s industry and region, then organizes them based on how big of a threat they pose.

For a U.S.-based e-commerce company, Mvision Insights might display attacks against other online retailers with operations in North America. The service gives administrators visibility into the impact of each hacking campaign as well as an estimate of how a breach would affect their own firm’s infrastructure. The security team can then make appropriate preparations.

If administrators at the hypothetical e-commerce company see that hackers have breached a number of industry peers by, say, exploiting a payment processing system which is also used internally, they could temporarily disable the application until a patch is available. Or they might isolate it from the outside world by adjusting the settings of the corporate firewall.

Mvision Insights fills in another missing piece of McAfee’s vision for its Mvision family of cloud security products. The company has been steadily expanding the scope of the portfolio in recent years, through not only organic development efforts but also the occasional acquisition. McAfee picked up Sequoia-based cloud security startup Skyhigh Networks Inc. in 2017 and, more recently, bought NanoSec Co. to add container protection capabilities to its arsenal. 

Alongside Mvision Insights, the company today unveiled the next phase of its plan for the product family. McAfee is pursuing a project dubbed “Unified Cloud Edge” aimed at making the various Mvision tools’ features centrally accessible through its ePolicy Orchestrator cybersecurity management platform.

McAfee is promising big benefits. According to the company, the integration will enable security teams to perform tasks such as setting up threat detection policies in one place instead of having to separately configure Mvision tools. In general, this kind of single pane of glass approach saves time by cutting duplicate work while also reducing the risk of inconsistencies between how different tools are configured, which improves security. 

Photo of McAfee CEO Chris Young: McAfee