Sales Pitches From McAfee, NortonLifeLock Stuck in Bygone Era - Bloomberg

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Hey y’all, it’s Austin, with some urgent news: My computer, and presumably yours, is in perilous danger. As McAfee Corp. has repeatedly warned me lately in radioactive-red pop-ups, “Emerging cyber-attack techniques threaten devices worldwide and may let hackers: steal your passwords; infiltrate private photos, emails, documents; [and] exploit hardware flaws in your devices.”

According to the McAfee promotion, which is built into my Windows desktop, I have only two options: click the “accept risk” button or renew my $120-per-year subscription for their antivirus software. For PC users, these types of five-alarm cybersecurity ads will be familiar, a scare tactic ubiquitous since the dawn of the internet. The crazy thing is that they still seem to work, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Subscriptions to antivirus programs rocketed as consumers were stuck at home and feverishly buying new household electronics. As a result, McAfee, which went public in October, has been “firing on all cylinders,” as an RBC Capital Markets analyst said on the company’s May earnings call. And only last week, reports surfaced that NortonLifeLock Inc. was in advanced talks to buy cybersecurity firm Avast Plc for over $8 billion, doubling down on the booming market. At a time when ransomware attacks and hacker threats are exploding, are these software makers finally ready to deliver on their promise?

For too long, these services were mostly overhyped. During the heyday of the PC revolution, antivirus programs grew pervasive partly thanks to preinstalled bloatware or web alerts that spooked consumers into downloading or buying their software, lest they remain vulnerable to external hackers and pesky malware. These companies provided a measure of peace of mind, even animating PC cybersecurity scans that declared a device safe or announced that an unseen virus had been expunged.

But their marketing was often spammy, to the point where ads for antivirus programs became hard to distinguish from the very phishing scams they claimed to protect against. Worse, antivirus software was notorious for slowing down PCs or having gaping security flaws of their own, while freemium tools created privacy concerns by mining personal data. Apple Inc.’s malware-free operating system became a big selling point against Windows, and Microsoft Corp. eventually caught up with new embedded antivirus protections that rendered third-party providers less relevant. Remarkably, some tech-review websites have begun recommending against relying on Norton or McAfee altogether. “The ‘best antivirus’ for most people to buy, it turns out, is nothing,” Wirecutter.com has written.

Covid-19’s work-from-home era sparked renewed usage of cybersecurity programs. McAfee, for one, saw net subscriptions jump 885,000 last quarter while revenue increased 25% compared with the same period last year. Bank of America technology analyst Tal Liani noted in April that NortonLifeLock has attracted nearly 1 million new subscribers since March 2020, after losing 1.2 million the previous eight quarters. Even so, Liani forecasted that there could be a big spike in churn after the pandemic subsides and customers are hit with renewal options.

These types of tools should be a no-brainer at moment of rampant data breaches and cyberattacks. Yet, while the enterprise endpoint cybersecurity market is blossoming, the consumer alternatives seem stuck in the past, still marketing the same frightening digital hazards and swearing that their software will envelope your computer in a cocoon of safety. NortonLifeLock’s Chief Executive Officer Vincent Pilette was only recently on TV talking up how the “bad guys” were coming after people by artificially replicating your voice in order to trick others into divulging information about you. Never mind that Norton’s antivirus software wouldn’t exactly protect against this sort of advanced threat; their pitch is apparently that you should pay for their security blanket so you mitigate the risk of getting into this situation in the first place. NortonLifeLock didn’t respond to a request for comment.

I would love to pay for an antivirus program that truly provides peace of mind, but with my data and browsing now spread across desktops and laptops, tablets and smartphones, and video-game consoles and cloud services, it seems terribly unlikely paying $120 a year for McAfee or a rival service will do more than provide a false sense of security.

For now, outside being more careful with my internet habits and using two-factor authentication, I’ve been telling McAfee’s pop-up ads over and over that I won’t be renewing my subscription by clicking the “accept risk” button. If only they’d take no for an answer. — Austin Carr

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