It's been a big year in the security world. Between WannaCry, Petya and the rest, the dangers posed by cyber criminals have started to hit home in a way we haven't really seen before.

At MPOWER, McAfee has looked into this and more and, in my opinion, presented a coherent view of what the future of the security landscape looks like not just for the company but more globally.

The key themes can be summarised thus: Attackers are not stupid and in many cases have a high level of resources at their disposal perhaps even more than a nation state. Attacks and attack methods will get ever more sophisticated, such as ransomware being used as a decoy rather than the main attack. In order to stand a chance of beating or getting ahead of them, security vendors need to completely change tactics, or otherwise we're stuck in a "Red Queen race" situation running ever faster and exhausting ourselves, but getting nowhere.

This is all true and interesting, but if you're in the security industry they're not really novel ideas.

What was refreshing about MPOWER, however, was the emphasis on communicating these risks and trends to businesses, within businesses and to the wider community without resorting to FUD - sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt.

This has been indeed, still is the security industry's stock in trade. The opening to this year's RSA conference was a shining example of this (I'm not going to regale you with the full details, but it involved pictures of war zones and apocalyptic soliloquies).

What has turned McAfee off this approach? It's hard to say - perhaps reality is scary enough nowadays - but it's nice to have someone lay out the challenges and possible solutions in a measured, rather than melodramatic, way.

The other key theme has been the importance of partnerships, encompassed by the event's "Together is Power" tagline. In practice this means multiple things -- humans and machines working together, breaking down silos within businesses and, of course, its own Security Innovation Alliance.

It's hard to deny the importance of collaboration when it comes to security, though - all the biggest take downs and raids have been thanks to various vendors and law enforcement agencies working together.

All in all, it has been an enlightening and informative week, with McAfee cementing its new identity. Let's hope we can continue to have more rational discussions about security outside of conference centres in Las Vegas too.

Main image credit: McAfee

Disciplines such as artificial intelligence and machine learning are playing increasingly important role in cyber security, but not at the expense of human intellect.

This is one of the key messages from the first day of McAfee MPOWER, the company's annual security conference in Las Vegas.

Indeed, one of the company's two new product launches, Investigator, has this complementary approach of human and machine at its very heart.

Speaking during a press panel on "human machine teaming", McAfee CTO Steve Grobman explained why in cyber security the human element remains so vital, whereas advanced analytics and AI is replacing humans in other disciplines.

"I think cyber security is a fundamentally different field to many other areas where artificial intelligence, machine learning is being used, Grobman said. "The example I like to give is weather forecasting [because] as we get better at forecasting weather, the laws of physics don't get upset and decide to change the way water evaporates. As we get better over time at forecasting where hurricanes are going to land, we make continuous progress.

"What makes cyber security such a different field than almost everything else in natural science that's using these same technologies is there's an adversary applying game theory on the other side of the table that's going to change the game. What machines are not good at is recognising human intellect you really need humans to understand human intellect."

Celeste Fralick, chief data scientist at McAfee, said the important thing is to use both AI and human resources rationally and where they can be of greatest value.

"We're dealing with humans and we have to act like humans back," she explained. "But at scale, you don't have an opportunity to do that logically with that amount of data [coming in] so you're going to have to do something different."

Machines, she said, should be used for tasks like summarising data, identifying patterns and making predictions, while humans should do more creative thinking at a human level, such as what the adversary may be doing. Based on that and the information provided by the data science capabilities, humans should then be the ones to decide what level of intervention is required and plan out next steps.

"Cyber security far outweighs [other disciplines in] the variety of data and the amount of data that's coming in because [cyber-attacks are] human driven [and] machine driven," Fralick explained. That pairing, she said, has to be reflected in how cyber security vendors respond to the threat.

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Machine learning and artificial intelligence have taken centre stage at McAfee MPOWER for the announcement of the company's latest endpoint security product.

McAfee Investigator, as the product is called, automates data collection and uses advanced analytics to piece together and visually represent suspected attack intelligence.

It also uses AI and machine learning to learn attacks, techniques and procedures as it goes along, which can help human analysts in a Security Operations Centre (SOC) ask more relevant questions and resolve cases faster.

During his opening keynote at MPOWER, McAfee CEO Chris Young said: "In order to help you support those overburdened security operations environments ... we're unveiling McAfee investigator. It's a net new offer that's designed to help your security operations team increase its effectiveness."

"It's about defending your entire organisation, not just specific point threats in silo," Young continued. "It reconstructs attacks that are happening across your environment. It builds on other tools and platforms you've got in your environment using data science methodologies ... [to bring] together global and local threat intelligence, and basically help triage threats by teaming humans with machines."

In addition to Investigator and a new cloud-focused solution, Cloud Workload Security, McAfee has also updated one of its existing offerings, Endpoint Security (ENS).

Much like Investigator, ENS now features machine learning to analyse files before and after execution to help protect against unknown threats. This information is also fed back to McAfee where it's aggregated, serving as a source to help improve its threat detection algorithms.

MPOWER continues all week. Click here for more news from the event.

Main image credit: Jane McCallion | Dennis Publishing

McAfee's annual Mpower cyber security conference kicks off in Las Vegas this week, but there's been something of a revamp compared to recent years.

For a start, the name has changed, as it was formerly known as Intel Security Focus. Following McAfee splitting from Intel in April this year, the company is clearly trying to reestablish itself as an independent entity.

In this respect, I expect Mpower to be somewhat like the first Dell EMC World or HPE Discover, in sentiment, rather than content. Just like them, McAfee is an established brand that's been forged into a new company and is trying to get its new identity across to customers, partners and other potential 'stakeholders'.

In terms of content, that's a little harder to say. Plenty of security knowledge, of course, but that's a broad church and with the WPA2 vulnerability news revealed today, there are almost certainly some keynote speakers holding their head in their hands and weeping, or furiously rewriting their scripts. Or both.

Other topics that are likely to come up include the security or otherwise of the Internet of Things (IoT), the future of privacy and security in the face of government demands to break encryption, and securing businesses in an ever more connected world with an increasingly flexible workforce.

I also anticipate discussions on cloud security and the role of the channel in helping businesses protect their most important assets.

The event kicks off on Wednesday 18 October and I'll be on the ground reporting. Make sure to follow me on Twitter for live tweets from the event and click here for all the latest news and analysis as it comes in.

Main image credit: McAfee