McAfee‘s chief technology officer has teased several big announcements from the security company ahead of its Focus 14 conference being held this week in Las Vegas.
Though he revealed few specifics, Michael Fey hopes that a new "trust model" to be unveiled by the firm will overhaul a decades-old security landscape.
"The trust model we run all this on we built 20 years ago, and 20 years later that trust model is still the same," he said.
"All of this stuff is the same, yet look at the massive amount of our economy that we put on top of it. It’s ridiculous."
Much of the problem he attributed to the fragmented nature of the security industry, the size of which Fey described as "insignificant" in relation to the gross domestic product (GDP) of the entire economy.
He added that McAfee’s acquisition by Intel four years ago had given them an opportunity to change how cybersecurity worked.
In other comments, Fey pushed the the importance of McAfee’s Threat Intelligence Exchange (TIE), which he described as "one of the most disruptive technologies we’ve ever had our hands on".
"Fundamentally we are giving the security defences the ability now to say ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure.’ We’ve never had that before," he said.
"What we’ve had is the requirement to make instantaneous decisions at line speeds without impacting the user. You can imagine when you have those general requirements to start with you let a lot of stuff through."
TIE will allow security professionals to defer decisions about potential threats without impacting the user experience, letting them take longer over investigating whether action needs to be taken, according to the company.
Fey also boasted that he would showcase a point-of-sales (PoS) system that would reduce the likelihood of being breached to almost zero, a major development given the role of sales points in massive breaches against retailers over the last year.
However he had earlier said he was "bored" of the conversation about breaches affecting millions of customers, following a plethora of media coverage on breaches against the retailer Target, the auctioneer eBay and the bank JP Morgan, among others.
