Intel To Acquire McAfee

Chalk this one up on the ‘uh, what?’-list of acquisitions. Intel announced today that it has acquired Mcafee, the security and antivirus company we all know and love. The press release is a bit vague on why, exactly, Intel made this rather odd acquisition.

I guess the general gist here is that Intel wants to combine security software and hardware together, but how exactly what works out in real-world advantages for us poor consumers isn’t clear from the press release. There’s some chatter about how the number of internet-connected devices is increasing rapidly, and that they need to be secured.

“With the rapid expansion of growth across a vast array of Internet-connected devices, more and more of the elements of our lives have moved online,” said Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO, “In the past, energy-efficient performance and connectivity have defined computing requirements. Looking forward, security will join those as a third pillar of what people demand from all computing experiences.”

“The cyber threat landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years, with millions of new threats appearing every month,” said Dave DeWalt, president and CEO of McAfee, “We believe this acquisition will result in our ability to deliver a safer, more secure and trusted Internet-enabled device experience.”

I’ve never been a particular fan of security companies like McAfee, because they have the tendency to needlessly scare the living daylights out of people, coercing them to buy crappy software that seriously harms computers – it’s almost like they themselves are selling a virus.

The best antivirus and antimalware tool today (for Windows) is Microsoft’s own Security Essentials, which has a simple and easy interface, is very light on resources, and most important of all, doesn’t get in your face all the damn time. Oh, and of course, it’s free.

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