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Highlights Video
View this brief highlights video to find out more about FOCUS 08.
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Photo Gallery
Registration
Welcome Reception
General Sessions
Sponsor Expo
Breakouts
Final Night Party: McAfee and You In Concert
Farewell Luncheon
Miscellaneous
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FOCUS Testimonials
“Thanks for a great show. FOCUS 08 was the best conference I have ever attended, and it definitely won't be my last. The sessions were thought provoking and intuitive and the presenters as well as the attendees were all quite knowledgeable. There was a treasure trove of ideas, solutions, and expertise to draw from. What a wonderful impact it's provided to my organization. Probably the best bang for my buck in many years!”
Community College of Philadelphia
“FOCUS 08 was the first major McAfee event I've ever attended. I was very impressed with the organization of the event and the number of tracks presented. Most beneficial to me was the ability to network with peers and meet one-on-one with McAfee product managers. This gave us the ability to understand each other’s issues and how to address them.”
Enbridge Gas Distribution, Inc.
“I found that having access to the professionals who invented and/or designed these technologies as well as the subject-matter experts was invaluable. The trip was a worthy investment.”
Baker Hughes
“Great content. Great location. Viva Mcafee!”
Columbus McKinnon
“FOCUS 08 was a really good first conference. It was informative, as well as entertaining. FOCUS was definitely a good use of my time.”
Silver State Schools Credit Union
“FOCUS is a great occasion to see the latest security technology and meet with other partners, customers, and McAfee representatives.”
Bafing S.A.C.
“FOCUS provided a very detailed overview of where we are today and what is in store for tomorrow for the future of enterprise security.”
Kaiser Permanente
“I've been in IT for 32 years, doing anti-virus administration for 10 of those with a large enterprise network. The planning that went into creating a world class conference was apparent at every turn. The Place, Avert Labs, and Partner Expo options provided excellent opportunities for learning. The daily sessions were not marketing oriented, but targeted to providing real solutions and help us to understand the full range of emerging threats we are facing.”
Capgemini Energy
“As a McAfee VAR, I was glad to participate at FOCUS 08. The vision, direction, and the action plan McAfee is putting in place will help us improve our business in 2009.”
NetSafe Informática
“I left this conference with more value for my company than anything else I have done. The Place is a great networking opportunity and meeting the McAfee staff gave me insights and energized me.”
Mercy Hospital
“FOCUS 08 exceeded all of my expectations. I really enjoyed hearing firsthand about the efforts and strategies of the industry leaders in the fight to protect us from the “bad guys”. Great job done by all!”
Deloitte
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Cyber Crime Panel Webcast
Check out the webcast replay of FOCUS 08's Cyber Crime Panel.
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Daily Highlights
Monday, October 20
Welcome Reception
7:00 pm – 10:00 pm,
Studio 54, MGM Grand Hotel
Held at MGM’s ultra-chic nightclub Studio 54, the conference’s kickoff social event featured great food and first-class entertainment.
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Security Innovation Alliance Blog from FOCUS 08
Tuesday, October 20, 2008 at 5:03 pm PDT
Joe Gottlieb, VP – Corp. Strategy & Technology Alliances, McAfee, Inc.
McAfee hosted its first Security Innovation Alliance (SIA) Developer Conference today at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, in conjunction with FOCUS 08, to help expand our partners understanding of the tools and processes that comprise the heart and soul of the SIA. Though our program is barely a year old, we’ve made some major strides. We have already signed more than 30 partners in more than ten categories, confirmed our first McAfee compatible solutions, published an updated software development kit (SDK), hosted several joint marketing events and secured our first sales wins with SIA partners.
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McAfee’s user conference is sponsored in part by 19 SIA partners who will either showcase their completed integrations or speak about their upcoming integrations. As part of today’s SIA momentum press release, we announced that three new partners have passed compatibility testing—ArcSight, Application Security, Inc. and SenSage. We’ve also added six new partners to the SIA program, including Alcatel-Lucent, Centrify, netForensics, Prevari, Secure Elements and SPYRUS. In addition, we’ve named the annual “Most Innovative Technology Partner” award, but stay tuned until tomorrow, when we’ll formally share the name the winner.
It’s a great start, but the real breakthroughs lie ahead as Phase 1 integrations evolve into Phase 2 innovations, driven by derivative use cases validated with common customers. I believe our opportunity to deliver value is unprecedented, thanks to McAfee’s sizable installed base, industry-leading management system, broad product portfolio and open architecture. Combined with our partner’s commitment to collaborate on compatible solutions that reduce risk, increase compliance and decrease operational costs, we’ve got the makings of a world-class technology partnering program. |
Tuesday, October 21
Opening General Session: Something Needs to Change — The Global Security Challenge and How the Industry Must Respond
Featuring: Dave DeWalt, CEO and President, McAfee, Inc.;
Howard Schmidt, R & H Security Consulting;
Shawn Henry, FBI
8:00 am – 10:30 am
Breakout Sessions – 10:45 am – 5:30 pm
Sponsor Expo –
11:45 am – 2:00 pm
Vegas Enjoys Cloudless Skies and Cloud Computing at FOCUS 08
Tuesday, October 21, 2008 at 10:31 am PDT
Cloud computing has moved well up the hype cycle into the value zone. McAfee today revealed tangible examples of how this industry term is paying off now for customers, and could pay off even more in the coming quarters.
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Dave DeWalt, President and CEO of McAfee, and Christopher Bolin, McAfee CTO, kicked off FOCUS 08 with a discussion of McAfee’s strategy, including the way cloud computing technologies will benefit McAfee customers at the endpoint, in the network, and on the road. According to DeWalt and Bolin, real-time behavioral protection in Artemis technology is rolling out now to consumers and enterprises that opt in. This cloud computing technology provides instantaneous protection against new malware so recent that it isn’t part of daily .DAT updates. When something new and potentially risky crops up on a system, Artemis checks in with McAfee’s global research team in real-time to discover if the malware is a new threat.
What makes it a cloud computing technology? By capturing information about what malware is cropping up where, how often, all over the world, Artemis harvests insight from the millions of email and web activities of McAfee users every day. It doesn’t matter where the threat comes from, where it is experienced, where the database is that captures its attributes, or which continent hosts the threat researcher that diagnoses its risk. The benefits pay off locally, for each user, with immediate protection.
Artemis is one example of how McAfee has turned $1 billion of investment into layered protection for peripatetic users. Some of it was spent on R and D—Artemis, ePolicy Orchestrator 4 (ePO), Advanced Server in VSE, open APIs, and a new Network Access Control solution that DeWalt announced at the show. Much of it must have been spent on strategic acquisitions—Onigma, Reconnex, SafeBoot, ScanAlert.
What’s exciting for customers is how well R and D aligns with M and A. Unlike many companies whose acquisitions end up as point solutions that complicate life for IT, DeWalt made it clear that integration was a central element of McAfee product strategy. Already, many of the recent acquisitions are using ePO, with its open interfaces, common agent, and centralized management and reporting.
And the fun is just beginning. Bolin was joined by Mike Gallagher, the CTO of Secure Computing, a McAfee partner, to discuss how reputation and behavioral analysis in the cloud could improve McAfee product effectiveness going forward. McAfee products in the endpoint, in the network, and in the cloud (think software as a service), can all be more effective as multiple inputs—volume, longevity, reputation, social networks, identities, URL, IP address—add new dimensions to threat assessment for higher accuracy and precision.
All this information in just the first hour of the conference. Don’t you wish you were here?
McAfee’s Initiative to Fight Cybercrime – A Noble Cause
Tuesday, October 21, 2008 at 6:19 pm by David DeWalt
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Today McAfee unveiled a major initiative that you will hear a lot about in the coming months- our multi-point plan to fight cybercrime.
Why is McAfee doing this? We’re doing it because it’s a noble cause that unites our entire company. There’s a lot of passion and energy around this. We realized we had a lot of forensic data-malware samples, phishing scams and more, which led us to think: ”it’s great that we can block this, but what about the culprit?” We realized that we needed a much stronger interlock between the private and the public sectors.
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Today’s panel discussion with Howard Schmidt and Shawn Henry reinforced several reasons for launching this initiative, including an exponential rise in cybercrime that includes increasingly personal attacks. Criminals are good at playing on people’s emotions, and this September 11th was the highest spam day in history. Why? When people read about things that they care passionately about, they are more likely to forget about security. We’re seeing this with election season as well.
Don’t get me wrong, progress is being made. Some high profile spammers have been arrested and prosecuted, but the statistics tell a different story:
– Only 16% of cybercrime is reported
– Criminals have less than a 10% chance of being convicted
– This year we’re seeing a 300% rise or more in net new malware—1.5 million pieces in all
Although we have new cybercrime laws, and recent indictments, we believe there’s more progress to be made, particularly in the area of education. McAfee is working hard to educate users and law enforcement on the tricks used by these criminals, so they can help us bring them to justice.
There are more resources available than most people know about, and we’re going to set up a victims’ assistance unit to help people when they think they’re become the victims of crime. This consists of a Web site and a hotline where we can introduce them to the right resources and government agencies.
Last year we gave a Cybercrime Fighter Award to Greg Abbott, who had a phenomenal conviction rate of cybercriminals in Texas. This year at Focus we gave awards to Alexander Seger of the Council of Europe and Laura Kovesi, Romania’s Prosecutor General, who are taking the fight to a global scale.
No other company is doing what we’ve announced. We’re going after the problem using money, technology and new interlocks between business and governments. By launching this initiative, we’re hoping to create a community of consumers, CIOs and law enforcement officials. We are educating partners and encouraging other companies to join this effort. We’re recruiting the world’s leading cybercrime experts to advise us on strategy and bring together resources in a way that’s never been done before.
It’s a great feeling going to work knowing that we have the power to help stop criminals. We hope you join will join us in this noble cause.
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Wednesday, October 22
General Session: Major Changes in Security—Defending Yourself from Every Angle
Featuring: John Pescatore, Gartner, Inc.; Gregory Bryant, Intel Corp.; Raghu Raghuram, VMware, Inc.; Marius Haas, HP
8:30 am – 10:00 am
Breakout Sessions – 10:30 am - 5:00 pm
Sponsor Expo – 11:30 am – 1:30 pm; 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm
Final Night Party: McAfee and You In Concert – 8:00 pm – 11:00 pm
Featuring: Virtuoso pianist Geanina Golea, American Idol 2006 runner-up Katharine McPhee, electro-acoustic violinist Nina DiGregorio, and amazing singer-songwriter Peter Cincotti.
Consumerization Defines a New IT Security Reality
Wednesday, October 22, 2008 at 12:46 pm
According to Raghu Raghuram of VMware, 20-25% of users access enterprise services through private computers today. This proportion is growing quickly with mobile access, new service delivery strategies, and a Gen X/Y workforce molded by mobile devices and social networks.
Gartner has coined the term “consumerization” for the reality that unmanaged endpoints and consumer-based services have permanently changed the control model for IT. Opening day 2 at FOCUS 2008, John Pescatore, VP at Gartner, predicted that this change will be one of the major challenges for security in the next two years, with specific new risks coming in social network subversion, hypervisor attacks, malicious mashups, and SOHO-based attacks.
IT security must now deal with managed systems (desktops and servers), mobile systems (laptops, smartphones, and USB devices), and remote, unmanaged access by users anywhere. At FOCUS, Pescatore discussed this challenge with executives from Intel, VMware, HP, and McAfee, and each proposed different strategies for securing this new future.
In the devices themselves, Intel plans to allow security and management to be activated at the silicon level. In this model, a chip can initiate a security scan and policy compliance check, whether or not a device is turned on. Security policies can be enforced at the lowest level to implement encryption and enforce data protection. Access control and authentication can drop from the application level into the hardware for rigorous control and remote management. For employees that never enter the office, remote services will be the only way to deliver and update protections and enforce compliance.
The Intel model assumes IT can predict and control the device used for access—and ensure it has the enabling silicon. In contrast, VMware takes the view that desktops will be virtual, using applications and data from an elastic Internet and compute cloud. So security must live in a virtual container that can enforce policies on the fly. For example, this container could control port access for applications or mandate anti-virus scans. Integrations with McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator and McAfee Endpoint Encryption are on the way to make these ideas real.
Reality will be multi-dimensional, however. Intel reminded attendees that mobile users need online and offline productivity, precluding exclusively virtual systems, and they demand a personalized user experience in both modes, so one device will never do it all.
What should IT do today? Pragmatically, Pescatore pointed out that unmanaged devices are spurring investments in network access control (NAC) technologies that can detect and defend now. He also noted that a harsh economic climate will accelerate the trend to virtualization for its cost savings. VMware suggested that the rearchitecting that happens with a virtualization rollout presents an opportunity to improve security, which is one reason it is working closely with McAfee on securing the risks common to both physical and virtual environments, as well as virtualization-specific issues such as scanning and updates of offline virtual images.
Consumerization is here to stay. The McAfee partnerships described here showed how we will enforce policies and maintain compliance even as we lose direct control of the endpoints themselves.
Thursday, October 23
Meet the Speakers – 8:00 am – 9:00 am
Breakout Sessions – 9:00 am – 10:00 am; 10:15 am – 11:15 am
Farewell Luncheon and General Session: Sin City Security
Featuring: George Togliatti, Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino
11:30 am – 1:00 pm
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FOCUS 08 Media Kit
Visit the FOCUS Media Kit page for complete details on press activity at FOCUS.
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