McAfee's latest version of its managed security service includes new features that let companies scan their Web sites for vulnerabilities as well as check for compliance with payment-card industry standards for handling financial data.
McAfee's Total Protection Service 5.0 has also been expanded to 18 languages, said Sal Viveros, a McAfee security analyst.
The vulnerability assessment service scans Web sites to see if they've been hacked and then can send reports to administrators as to what's wrong. The service can also check to see if a particular Web site complies with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, which is a set of rules supported by card companies such as MasterCard and Visa.
McAfee has also integrated into the latest release technology that came from Secure Computing, which McAfee announced it would acquire in September 2008 for US$465 million.
That includes TrustedSource, which was Secure Computing's intelligence system for collecting information on malware, e-mail and Web threats. It can judge the legitimacy of a Web site or e-mail message based on its reputation, or a set of characteristics that can be analyzed to determine what threat it poses.
The Web filtering in 5.0 has been improved, allowing administrators more control over the Web sites their users can access, Viveros said. For example, Web sites that have only come online in the past week or so could be blocked, Viveros said. Harmful Web sites often are online for less than that time before an Internet service provider takes one down.
McAfee has also tweaked other performance aspects, such as administrators' ability to collect data on the status of their deployed machines through an improved management console, Viveros said.
McAfee has also thrown SiteAdvisor into the package. SiteAdvisor scans Web pages that are returned after a query on a search engine and gives a yellow or red warning for those that may harm a person's PC.
A new feature in 5.0 allows administrators access to those sites and only lets users go to those that get the green check icon. Previously, users could still visit sites that were marked as harmful or questionable, Viveros said.
Total Protection Service 5.0 supports the following languages: Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, simplified and traditional Chinese, Dutch, German, Spanish, English, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and Hebrew.
