Chris Dixon will indeed be the latest VC to join Andreessen Horowitz, as I had reported earlier was likely, starting in January.

Dixon is a lively and interesting choice for the high-profile Silicon Valley venture capital firm, having been a successful serial entrepreneur, a savvy angel investor and also a voluble tech scene commenter in blogs and on Twitter.

Perhaps most interesting is that Dixon, who is largely based in New York, will move to California to join what Marc Andreessen describes as a “single-office” firm.

In other words, Chris, get ready to be force-fed at Hobee’s!

In all seriousness, Andreessen said in an interview today that his big criteria for picking Dixon was because, “when the next Mark Zuckerberg walks into the room, we want them to say, ‘I want that person.’”

In addition, he noted that Andreessen Horowitz has a “bias for entrepreneurs … and Chris is the real deal when it comes to being an entrepreneur.”

Indeed, Dixon was CEO and co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, as well as recommendations engine Hunch, which was bought by eBay a year ago.

He is one of the founding members of Founder Collective, an East Coast-based seed-stage venture firm run by entrepreneurs, and is also an active angel investor, including in Skype, Invite Media and OMGPOP. Previously, he programmed financial algorithms at a high-speed options trading firm and has also worked at Bessemer Venture Partners.

Dixon, whose job at Bessemer was junior, said that he became interested in Andreessen Horowitz once he learned more about them after helping the start-ups he had invested in with fundings. He was especially struck by all the added help the firm provided in areas such as recruiting.

While he said his investing as a partner there would be “non-thematic,” he noted that it was likely he would “tilt more toward consumer” investments.

“I am going to try to pick the special bird,” he said, paraphrasing a quote by famed Sequoia Capital VC Mike Moritz. “And not the flock.”

Here is a blog post on the move by Dixon and one by Andreessen, in which he apparently thinks I leak for a living.

The more pictures I see of this gun-toting, tatted-up, McAfee guy, the more I understand why PCs have so many viruses.

– Nick Bilton, via Twitter

“Traditional Web search makes you work hard for your information,” the former McAfee.com CEO told AllThingsD in an interview this week. “It’s almost like the DOS prompt.”

That’s a luxury people can afford when sitting at a computer and keyboard. But phones, Sampath said, have small screens and virtual keyboards, necessitating a better option.

Enter Grokr, Sampath’s Sunnyvale-based start-up that aims to deliver information before someone even knows they need it. Think of it as Google Now on steroids, focused on Apple devices.

“The future of search is not about searching,” Sampath said. “Information that we will need will just find us. Search transitions into this virtual mind reader and tells you things before you need to ask.”

Sampath, who also previously worked at U.S. Venture Partners, Mercora and Netscape, said the app will be able to do things like let you know if the band you’re listening to is coming to town, or if there is a delay on the roads you typically take to work.

Grokr is revealing Friday that it has raised a further $2.4 million in funding to finance its effort. Backers including NEA, U.S. Venture Partners, Triple Point Ventures and Lerer Ventures have so far pumped $4.2 million into the company.

Its product, an iPhone app, is still in private testing, with a public release slated for later this year.

Some of the information it locates will be pushed automatically, while less urgent matters will appear only when the app is opened. The goal is to be “just noisy enough,” Sampath said. Likewise, the company will have to strike a balance between fetching information a person might want and not draining the battery by constantly pinging a server.

Sampath gets that in tackling search, even mobile search, the company will necessarily be putting itself in competition with Google and Microsoft, among others. But he’s not shying away from the challenge.

“Someone needs to step up and say ‘Hey guys, this is what market needs.’”

The company has signed Shawn Henry, the FBI’s former executive assistant director of the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Service Branch, as the new president of its services subsidiary, CrowdStrike Services. Henry is a 24-year FBI veteran who led some of the Bureau’s biggest cybercrime cases.

Crowdstrike was launched by two veterans of McAfee, the security software concern that’s now a unit of chip giant Intel: George Kurtz, McAfee’s former CTO, and Dmitri Alperovitch, its former Vice President of Threat Research.

Not a great deal has yet been disclosed about Crowdstrike’s approach to security, but in the February 22 blog post announcing the launch of the company, Kurtz explained that, having seen the results of investigations into several high-profile cyber attacks, the current state of security practice is akin to the old French Maginot Line that was intended to keep out the Germans.

Kurtz argued that once you know your enemy — the party that’s attacking you — the key to success in stopping their attacks on your digital assets is to raise the cost of the human-powered portions of their attacks. “The only way to accomplish that is by forcing them to change the way they conduct the human-led parts of their intrusions, such as reconnaissance, lateral movement, identification of valuable assets, and exfiltration,” Kurtz wrote.

Henry did a short video announcing his move, and I embedded it below.

According to the latest Norton Online Family Report, nearly 62 percent of children worldwide have had a negative experience online — nearly four in ten involving serious situations, i.e. cyberbullying or receiving inappropriate photos from strangers. A whopping 74 percent of kids active on social networks say they’ve found themselves in unpleasant situations alone, while additional surveys reveal that nearly eight in ten have witnessed acts of meanness or cruelty on Facebook, Google+ or other similar services.

It’s a serious problem when three out of every four middle and high school kids own a cellphone, yet a quarter of adolescents say parents know little or nothing about what they’re doing on the Internet. Even more so when you consider that 20 percent of kids won’t tell parents about negative online experiences for fear of getting into trouble, according to Norton’s findings.

Welcome to the digital age — an era increasingly defined by a growing gulf between those who grew up with technology and those to whom modern-day advancements such as apps, cloud computing and smartphones remain esoteric. And, for that matter, one in which experienced role models able to provide positive, real-world solutions for addressing new and emerging problems (e.g. cyberbaiting, sexting and live broadcasting of personal data) are increasingly hard to find. For previous generations, parents and grandparents could serve as a vital source of wisdom and learning for all things family-related. But like many of today’s educators and experts, they too are facing the stark reality of having never been confronted by life in a world of 24/7 online streaming downloads, instant mobile video sharing, and innocent mistakes that live on in infamy forever via the Internet.

Even technology insiders presently struggle to define rules of online etiquette, social media conduct and personal boundaries, given the speed at which advancements now arrive and online trends shift. That’s problematic for parents, who are expected to lead by example. As ever, the answer lies with education. But there’s a widening chasm appearing between the reality of connected life and the lack of online awareness being provided by our school system.

Based on recent surveys, parents, kids and teachers largely agree that the Internet and technology should be better integrated into modern schools, college curriculums and university classrooms. According to the non-profit National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA), however, schools are ill-prepared to teach online safety, security and digital citizenship. Case in point: Over 80 percent of school administrators say they do an adequate job of preparing students to meet the challenges a digital world presents. However, a frightening 36 percent of teachers claim they’ve received zero hours of training in the previous year when surveyed.

A moving target, keeping kids safe naturally requires ongoing effort and discussion from all sides — kids, parents, teachers and law enforcement officials alike — all of whom must actively work to provide families with support, and share learning and best practices. But make no mistake: We need basic training and ongoing education in digital citizenship and online safety in schools now — not in the near or distant future. Frankly, parents underestimate just how drastically tomorrow’s family depends on it. Having recently returned from this year’s edition of toy industry gala Toy Fair — suddenly crawling with app-enabled action figures, Barbie dolls with built-in digital cameras and faux cellphones for toddlers — it’s clear that a fundamental sea change is happening. Technology continues to move at a blistering clip, and to permeate nearly every aspect of household life, even from the youngest age. As both parents and responsible role models, this demands that we question whether we’re doing enough to keep up.

Companies such as McAfee, Lookout, Kaspersky, Webroot and Trend Micro all offer software solutions that block or filter questionable content. Others, like Web Watcher and Net Nanny, offer apps and Web browsers that provide sanitized content for children’s usage. But as we know, truly determined kids can circumvent all of these, and companies will tell you themselves that software is no substitute for parenting. Only by proactively teaching positive computing and digital lifestyle habits can such problems truly be addressed. Discussion can, and must, occur surrounding digital citizenship and online safety starting at the earliest years, and continue into later phases of adolescent and even professional life. Moreover, we need to recognize the pressing importance of keeping these conversations going daily in homes, schools and boardrooms the globe over. Standardized educational solutions and training programs that teach high-tech safety rules and responsible online usage could prove the solution. Whether solutions come from the state, private or non-profit sector, though, it’s vital that we better equip kids and adults alike to meet the challenges of the modern world.

As transformative a force for good as technology and social media can be, fixating on sensationalized danger isn’t the way forward, nor is attempting to halt the spread of these highly beneficial innovations. But we must take measures to keep pace with progress’ steady — and suddenly bewilderingly fast — advancement. We owe it to ourselves to better prepare parents and kids to greet the many positives and challenges the connected life brings, even if it means our kids have to scold us someday for committing the (hopefully by-then archaic) faux pas of posting embarrassing baby photos of them to our Facebook profiles.

High-tech parenting expert Scott Steinberg has just launched a new book series, “The Modern Parent’s Guide,” covering all aspects of connected family life, and companion video show “Family Tech: Technology for Parents and Kids.” The first volume, “The Modern Parent’s Guide to Kids and Video Games,” is downloadable for free at www.ParentsGuideBooks.com now.

Now, a new app, called Enlocked, says it’s going to make email encryption at the consumer level even easier, by introducing a mobile and Web application that adds a one-tap encryption button to an existing email account.

Enlocked works by offering an encryption option that can be applied on a message-by-message basis. A user who has downloaded the Enlocked app would see the “secure send” option as they’re sending an email. If the sender opts to send it with encryption, the recipient then receives two emails: One informing him or her that an encrypted email is about to come through, and another that is the actual email.

The catch is that the first one prompts the user to download Enlocked in order to read the encrypted email (click on the image at left).

On mobile, Enlocked is available for iOS and Android devices; the company expects a BlackBerry app to become available in about 60 days. In terms of Web-based email services, Enlocked is available on Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer, with a Safari plugin in the works, and it works with Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Windows Live or AOL email. Interestingly, it also works with Microsoft Outlook (including Microsoft Exchange systems).

The big question with a “vanishing email” service like Burn Note is how or whether e-messages are recoverable. With Enlocked, the question might be how long a user would be able to send encrypted emails from a work-related Outlook account, before it grabs the attention of network administrators. The app can be applied to corporate Outlook accounts, said Enlocked CEO Guy Livneh, making it so email administrators can’t read sent emails. Even if someone were to hack into an account, the message would still be scrambled in outgoing mail.

It’s currently free to use, and Livneh says the plan is to keep the consumer-facing apps free, but Enlocked may eventually offer a premium service at a cost. The company said it doesn’t plan to serve up targeted ads in emails as a way to monetize the service. (Enlocked also said it doesn’t store copies of encrypted emails sent through its app.)

Enlocked was launched this week by co-founder Livneh, formerly of database security company Sentrigo, which was acquired by McAfee last year; McAfee’s CTO of database security, Slavik Markovich, is an investor and board member.

Livneh acknowledged that the standard, open-sourced PGP-encryption method behind Enlocked isn’t new. What is new, Livneh said, is how accessible they’re making it to consumers.

“We think we’ve created an easier barrier to entry,” he said. “The magic is supposed to be in the usability for consumers.”

There are other ways that people can send encrypted emails from personal accounts, though Livneh insists that Enlocked’s mobile apps and Web plugins are more convenient to use. There’s Hushmail, for one, but that’s an entirely separate email service and not an application that you apply to your existing email account, such as your Gmail or Yahoo mail. There’s also Sendinc and Lockbin. As with Hushmail, Lockbin requires users to employ its application for sending emails.

(Image courtesy of Flickr/MJ Nault Photography)

I wrote then:

“The unvarnished fact is that the networked society to which we’ve become accustomed in the last several years has a soft, vulnerable underbelly.

And the more we rely upon it, the more people with a combination of advanced technical skills and repugnant motivations are going to look for ways to turn it against us.

Some will do so as a means of making a personal profit. Others may see it as a way of advancing a political or ideological agenda.

But others will want to use theirs skills to do serious harm to innocent people on a large scale.”

Part of these predictions or ruminations or whatever you care to call them makes me think of the hijinks of the group that started out in the spring variously known as LulzSec, Anonymous and later adopted the moniker AntiSec. This loosely affiliated group emerged from the wake of the various attacks against Sony, and seemed to have nothing to prove but that it could make mincemeat out of whatever security measures had been put in place by Sony or whatever video game outfit it had targeted on a given day.

Sony’s Playstation Network was a favorite target, and its service was at least partially offline during two months ended in July.

Then, as summer dawned, the group’s members became aware of global politics and teamed up with Anonymous, the Wikileaks-allied band of hackers known for their campaigns of digital civil disobedience. Together they declared “immediate and unremitting war” on governments and corporations, and said their top priority would be to steal and leak any classified government information, including but not limited to email and documentation. They attacked an Arizona police agency as a way of making a statement against anti-immigrant laws in that state, and published the names and home addresses of several officers.

Later they sought to earn some street cred by stealing “secret” documents from NATO, only to learn after the fact that the documents they released had not only been released before, but weren’t even really all that secret to begin with. It wasn’t long before alleged members of the group started showing up in handcuffs, which seemed not to faze them. The prospect of body bags and real-world violence during a confrontation with Mexican drug cartels, however, did.

Yet for all the headlines they garnered and the headaches they caused, the LulzSec/Anonymous/AntiSec gang wasn’t anywhere near the scariest thing to appear on the computer security landscape in 2011. To my mind, one of the top three scariest things was the disclosure of Operation Shady RAT, which Intel-unit McAfee said appeared to be the biggest large-scale compromise ever, affecting 72 organizations and governments around the world, including the U.S., Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, Canada and India — some of them dating back as far as 2006. McAfee said the attacker was a “state actor,” though it declined to name it. The candidate highest on the short list was, naturally, China.

The second truly scary incident was the attack carried out against RSA Security, a unit of the IT company EMC, the maker of the popular SecurID tokens that so many people have on their keychains and use to create an added layer of security that goes beyond the password. Months later, the U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin was attacked with duplicate SecurID tokens.

Finally, the Stuxnet Trojan (used by parties officially unknown, but probably Israel with a little help from the U.S.) continued to fascinate and confound security researchers in 2011. Having caused nuclear centrifuges in Iran to explode in an attempt to set back that country’s nuclear weapons research program, Stuxnet was found to have a sibling called Duqu. Unlike Stuxnet, which messed with industrial control computers and made them do things they wouldn’t normally do, Duqu’s mission was much simpler: Steal everything in sight.

And after that, it was discovered by researchers at Kaspersky labs that Stuxnet and Duqu are part of an even bigger family, with at least three more siblings still undetected by researchers, and that all five were created by the same people and with the same tools. Chances are we’ll see at least a few of those final three in 2012, particularly as tension with Iran heats up.

So while there was much to consider scary happening on the Internet in 2011, I’m grateful for being wrong on one key prediction: That we didn’t see a significant computer attack used to physically harm innocent people on a large scale. That’s one prediction I hope to miss for years to come.

Today, HP presented a new strategy intended to boost its role in the business of supplying IT security to large businesses. With two big shifts hitting the corporate computing environment — cloud computing and scores of worker-selected mobile devices entering the workplace — there are a lot of new security challenges giving CIOs headaches.

“If you look at those trends, they challenge the traditional notions of enterprise security,” says Tom Reilly, HP’s VP and general manager for Enterprise Security Products. “So we want to address those challenges.”

The traditional approach in IT security was to establish strong perimeters around the network and around a company’s computers that could keep bad guys out and let good guys in, and then setting strict rules about what people allowed access can do.

Cloud computing obviates the need for a perimeter, because all the computing resources are, well, in the cloud. They live on some virtualized server in someone else’s data center. And someone who brings their iPhone to the office expects to have the same level of access to the resources they need to do the job. The old models don’t really apply anymore.

Meanwhile, attacks are surging. A study by the Ponemon Institute — which, in fairness, was sponsored by HP’s subsidiary ArcSight — found that cyberattacks against a group of 50 large companies grew by 44 percent last year versus the prior year. The companies in the sample group — all of which had 700 or more users — were hit with a combined 72 successful attacks per week, averaging more than one per company per week. The study also found that the costs to mitigate these attacks went up by 56 percent year over year.

“The bad guys are getting better, but as we change our IT environment we’re giving them more surface area from which to launch these attacks,” Reilly says.

So HP is coming into the picture with what it says is a new approach. It turns out HP has been quietly building up its security bona fides through acquisitions. Last year it paid $1.5 billion to acquire security intelligence firm ArcSight, of which Reilly was CEO. In 2009, it acquired TippingPoint, a network security outfit that came with the $2.7 billion acquisition of 3Com. Another pair of acquisitions, Fortify and SPI Dynamics, both specialize in application security.

HP’s plan is to mix these security capabilities into its Enterprise services offerings, Reilly says. Rather than try to sell each company new firewalls or other stuff, HP can come in and augment whatever security the company is already using with better information about threats and a new set of tools that can see how the company’s infrastructure is being used, not just on-premise, but within cloud-based environments, as well.

The point, Reilly says, is not so much to sell specific new security products to companies, but to take a service-based approach that helps a company get a better handle on the new security troubles it may be facing.

The trouble is that HP hasn’t generally been viewed as a player in the IT security market, and risk-averse CIOs are usually slow to embrace new vendors, because they tend to have long-term relationships with suppliers. But with the nature of the threats changing, HP is apparently hoping to use its status as an established supplier of servers, PCs and other IT products and services, to start a conversation around security with its customers.

There has been a lot of activity around security in the last few years. Intel spent more than $7 billion to acquire the security software firm McAfee earlier this year, and IBM already offers a muscular set of security products and services. It will quickly run into competitors, for sure.

If nothing else, following as it does in the wake of HP’s plans to divest itself of PCs and its mobile device business, a robust security offering is something that enterprise customers are going to expect. If there’s really going to be a new enterprise-centric HP, expect to see more moves like this. Whether or not they’ll work is another matter.

The WaveSecure software offers the ability to remotely back up contacts, photos and other data, with such options as device tracking and remote-wipe capability.

And these aren’t the kind of cyber attacks carried out by bumbling troublemakers like the LulzSec gang, which make headlines but really only cause a nuisance for companies like Sony. In these cases, networks were compromised by remote access tools — or RATs, as they’re known in the industry. These tools — and they are tools, because they have legitimate uses for system administrators — give someone the ability to access a computer from across the country or around the world. In this case, however, they were secretly placed on the target systems, hidden from the eyes of day-to-day users and administrators, and were used to rifle through confidential files for useful information. It’s not for nothing that McAfee is calling this Operation Shady RAT.

McAfee says the attacker was a “state actor,” though it declined to name it. I’ll give you three guesses who the leading candidate is, though you’ll probably need only one: China.

Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee’s Vice President, Threat Research, makes a statement in his blog entry on the discovery that should give everyone minding a corporate or government network pause: “I am convinced that every company in every conceivable industry with significant size and valuable intellectual property and trade secrets has been compromised (or will be shortly), with the great majority of the victims rarely discovering the intrusion or its impact.” He further divides the worldwide corporate landscape into two camps: Those who have been compromised and know it, and those who simply don’t know it yet.

This has been a particularly nasty year on the cyber security front. (I hate to say it, but I told you so.) Prior to this, the big attack whose full impact has not yet been fully sized up was the one against the RSA SecureID system, which uses popular keychain devices that create a constantly changing series of numbers that in turn create a second password for access to system resources. They’re widely used in government and military circles and among defense contractors. Google has been a regular target in recent years.

The RSA attack and Operation Shady RAT are examples, Alperovitch says, of an “Advanced Persistent Threat.” The phrase has come to be a buzzword that, loosely translated into English, means the worst kind of cyber attack you can imagine. Unlike the denial-of-service attacks and network intrusions carried out by LulzSec and its ilk, which require only minimal skill and marginal understanding of how networks and servers work, an APT is carried out by someone of very high skill who picks his targets carefully and sneaks inside them in a way that is difficult to detect, which allows access to the target system on an ongoing basis that may persist for years.

How did these attacks happen? Its very simple: Someone at the target organization received an email that looked legitimate, but which contained an attachment that wasn’t. This is called “spear phishing,” and it has become the weapon of choice for sophisticated cyber attackers. The attachments are not what they appear to be — Word documents or spreadsheets or other routine things — and contain programs that piggyback on the targeted user’s level of access to the network. These programs then download malware which gives the attackers further access. This all happens in an automated way, but soon after, live attackers log in to the system to dig through what they can find, copy what they can, and make a getaway — though they often leave the doors unlocked so they can come back for repeat visits.

Alperovitch notes — correctly, to my mind — that the phrase has been picked up and overused by the marketing departments of numerous security companies. His larger point is that too often those attacked in this way refuse to come forward and disclose what they’ve learned, thereby allowing the danger to continue for everyone else.

Alperovitch says that the data taken in Operation Shady RAT adds up to several petabytes worth of information. It’s not clear how it has been used. But, as he says, “If even a fraction of it is used to build better competing products or beat a competitor at a key negotiation (due to having stolen the other team’s playbook), the loss represents a massive economic threat not just to individual companies and industries but to entire countries that face the prospect of decreased economic growth.” It’s also bad for a target’s national security, because defense contractors dealing in sensitive military matters are often the targets. The best thing that can happen is that victims start talking about their attacks and sharing information with each other so that everyone can be ready for the next one, which is surely coming.

The bigger news is that Dave DeWalt, the McAfee president who saw the company through its $7.7 billion acquisition by Intel last year, is departing, though he will remain on McAfee’s board.

It’s not the first time that DeWalt has taken a company into a large acquisition. In 2003, he was the CEO of Documentum, which was acquired by storage giant EMC. He’s also chairman of the board at Polycom and recently joined the board of Jive Software, the pre-IPO social enterprise concern where former McAfee director Tony Zingale is CEO.

Last month VentureBeat reported he was going to Palo Alto Networks, a security start-up backed by Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Globespan Capital Partners and JAFCO Ventures.

DeCesare joined McAfee in 2007 and had run its global operations, including manufacturing, facilities, and worldwide sales. Gebhart joined McAfee in 1999. His most recent role was running the retail and direct web sales strategies for the consumer, mobile and small business units.

It is in stealth mode no more. The company today took the wraps off at least some of its plans and revealed the closing of a $9.2 million Series A funding round that also includes investments from Ignition Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Levine is joining Bromium’s board.

Its founders are Gaurav Banga, the former CTO of Phoenix Technologies; Simon Crosby, the former CTO of the Data Center and Cloud Division of Citrix; and Ian Pratt, the current chairman of Xen.org and another Citrix veteran. Both Pratt and Crosby joined Citrix after it acquired the open source virtualization company Xensource in 2007.

Bromium is turning out to be a bit of a reunion of former Xensource execs: Frank Artale, a managing director at Ignition who was also a Xensource exec, is joining Bromium’s board as well.

So what does Bromium plan to do? It won’t say, but I got a few hints from Simon Crosby, Bromium’s CTO. “The timing of this is perfect to what is going on right now with all the attacks that have been going on recently,” he said.

The attacks against EMC’s RSA security products, and also on Google’s Gmail, he says, were carried out via the client — that is, end user devices like a PC, a smartphone or a tablet. “Bromium believes that getting to a secure era in cloud computing requires securing both the client and the cloud.”

And how to get there? Again, he wouldn’t say exactly, but he did point the way: Virtualization. The technique of creating numerous “virtual” computers that run concurrently on a single physical host computer has been a fundamental development in the evolution of cloud computing. “Everyone I think knows that virtualization can help with security, but no one has really delivered an elegant solution that enhances security through the use of virtualization,” Crosby told me. “This is where I think we can strike a blow for the good guys.”

For another hint, look at Intel’s recently closed acquisition of security software concern McAfee. “Intel gets that security needs to move closer to the hardware, and we would agree with that,” Crosby said. McAfee’s CTO, George Kurtz, is on Bromium’s board.

Bromium marks the second security start-up that Andreesen Horowitz has invested in recently. The other was Silver Tail Systems. And it probably won’t be the last. As AH founder Marc Andreesen said in his appearance with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at D9, he loves security. Why? “The threats keep morphing.” Indeed they do.

But, from a friend and former co-worker, I learned that the iPhone also doesn’t like it when it gets too hot.

Joris Evers, who now does PR for McAfee, was in Mexico City last month, sitting outside when his iPhone warned him that things had gotten too hot for comfort. It displayed a warning message and told him (in several languages) that the only thing it was willing to do was make an emergency call. Otherwise, it was waiting until things cooled down.

It also turns out that the iPhone, like Mobilized, likes talking about itself in the third person.

Evers said it was warm, not hot, though he was in the direct sun. His laptop was willing to work, despite the conditions.

“I guess iPhones need sun protection in addition to screen protection and fall protection,” Evers mused on his personal blog.

The result is a push from both start-ups and traditional security firms, with Webroot becoming the latest software maker to offer a mobile-specific product.

On Monday, the company launched Webroot Mobile Security for Android–a program that comes in a basic free version as well as a more advanced paid edition that sells for $14.95 per year. Webroot says that, for now, Best Buy will be its exclusive outlet for the paid version.

As with other smartphone security software, the new Webroot product focuses not just on protecting against viruses but also managing the threats posed by the fact that smartphones are basically easily lost honeypots filled with tons of personal information.

“We believe in protecting you as an individual, not just the device you use to connect to the Internet,” Webroot vice president Quinn Curtis said in a statement. “With smartphones and tablets, we carry around vast amounts of personal data including our contacts, emails, passwords, and even financial information. This data is targeted by cybercriminals through malware, online scams, and device theft, and the market success of the Android mobile operating system provides the scale they need to make those attacks profitable.”

Webroot joins McAfee and AVG as well as Lookout Mobile Security, a well-funded start-up that focuses on smartphone security software.

Two of the new directors come from the software security firm McAfee, where Jive CEO Tony Zingale held a board seat from 2008 until its $7.7 billion acquisition by chip giant Intel: Charles Robel was McAfee’s chairman and has been on its board’s audit committee, and sits on the board of Autodesk and is the lead independent director on the board of Informatica; and David DeWalt was McAfee’s president, and before that was president of software sales and services at storage giant EMC, following the acquisition of Documentum, which it acquired in 2003 and where he was CEO. Dewalt is chairman of the board at Polycom.

Jonathan  Heiliger  is  the  Vice  President  of  Technical Operations at Facebook, meaning he’s the one who makes Facebook go. He reports directly to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Before that he led the engineering team at Walmart.com, and before that he was COO at Loudcloud, the company that ultimately became Opsware.

Sundar  Pichai  is  vice  President  of  product  management at Google, and oversees such products as Google  Toolbar,  Chrome  and Chrome  OS. Before Google, he worked at Applied Materials, the maker of chip manufacturing gear, and was management consulting for McKinsey and Co.

I asked CEO Tony Zingale about Jive’s plans to go public. He wouldn’t comment on that, naturally, but its well understood that Zingale, who ran software company Mercury Interactive until its $4.5 billion sale to HP, was brought on with an IPO in mind, as The Wall Street Journal reported last year. He also wouldn’t comment when I asked him if Jive has hired any bankers.

But he did say that Jive is at what he called “an inflection point.” In case you hadn’t notice, social enterprise software is a segment that’s growing like crazy, with offerings from Salesforce.com, Parature, Yammer, and a host of others. “We’re building the next great enterprise software company,” Zingale says. “And guys like this don’t join boards of companies that aren’t already successful and that don’t have a pretty good runway ahead of them.”

Jive certainly has some momentum. It has about 3,000 corporate customers–including big names like Cisco Systems, Nike, VMWare, Intel and fast food giant Yum Brands–and about 15 million end users. And last year it landed a big $30 million investment from Kleiner Perkins. Its other investor is Sequoia Capital, which invested $15 million in 2007. Boomtown’s Kara Swisher talked to Zingale and another Jive director Ted Schlein about the investment in a video interview last year, which I’ve added below.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110330/in-another-pre-ipo-move-jive-software-adds-four-directors-all-with-public-company-experience/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110327/u-s-products-help-block-mideast-web/ http://allthingsd.com/20110327/u-s-products-help-block-mideast-web/#comments Mon, 28 Mar 2011 03:32:41 +0000 Paul Sonne and Steve Stecklow http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=38174 As Middle East regimes try to stifle dissent by censoring the Internet, the U.S. faces an uncomfortable reality: American companies provide much of the technology used to block websites.

McAfee Inc., acquired last month by Intel Corp., has provided content-filtering software used by Internet-service providers in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, according to interviews with buyers and a regional reseller. Blue Coat Systems Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., has sold hardware and technology in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar that has been used in conjunction with McAfee’s Web-filtering software and sometimes to block websites on its own, according to interviews with people working at or with ISPs in the region.

A regulator in Bahrain, which uses McAfee’s SmartFilter product, says the government is planning to switch soon to technology from U.S.-based Palo Alto Networks Inc. It promises to give Bahrain more blocking options and make it harder for people to circumvent censoring.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110327/u-s-products-help-block-mideast-web/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110228/intel-locks-up-mcafee/ http://allthingsd.com/20110228/intel-locks-up-mcafee/#comments Mon, 28 Feb 2011 23:31:59 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=37102 Intel announced today that its $7.7 billion acquisition of McAfee, announced in August, is now complete. McAfee will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary and continue to sell security products and services under its own brand. Meanwhile, the companies are working on “a fundamentally new approach [to security] involving software, hardware and services,” the first fruits of which should be ripe later this year.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110228/intel-locks-up-mcafee/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110228/webs-hot-new-commodity-privacy/ http://allthingsd.com/20110228/webs-hot-new-commodity-privacy/#comments Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:30:13 +0000 Julia Angwin and Emily Steel http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=37060 As the surreptitious tracking of Internet users becomes more aggressive and widespread, tiny start-ups and technology giants alike are pushing a new product: privacy.

Companies including Microsoft Corp., McAfee Inc.—and even some online-tracking companies themselves—are rolling out new ways to protect users from having their movements monitored online. Some are going further and starting to pay people a commission every time their personal details are used by marketing companies.

“Data is a new form of currency,” says Shane Green, chief executive of a Washington start-up, Personal Inc., which has raised $7.6 million for a business that aims to help people profit from providing their personal information to advertisers.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110228/webs-hot-new-commodity-privacy/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110210/oil-firms-hit-by-hackers-from-china-report-says/ http://allthingsd.com/20110210/oil-firms-hit-by-hackers-from-china-report-says/#comments Thu, 10 Feb 2011 13:30:50 +0000 Nathan Hodge and Adam Entous http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=36174 Hackers who appear to be based in China have conducted a “coordinated, covert and targeted” campaign of cyber espionage against major Western energy firms, according to a report expected to be issued today by cybersecurity firm McAfee Inc.

Law-enforcement agencies said they are investigating the incidents, which McAfee said have been going on at least since late 2009 but may have started as early as 2007. The company said the attacks, which it dubbed “Night Dragon,” were still occurring.

McAfee said the hackers targeted five multinational firms, but wouldn’t identify the companies by name because some of them are clients. McAfee said it was sharing the findings “to protect those not yet impacted and to repair those who have been.”

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110210/oil-firms-hit-by-hackers-from-china-report-says/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110131/intel-says-sandy-bridge-support-chip-has-design-errors/ http://allthingsd.com/20110131/intel-says-sandy-bridge-support-chip-has-design-errors/#comments Mon, 31 Jan 2011 19:02:03 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=2602 Shares of Intel are taking a bit of a drubbing today as the company announced it had discovered a design error in a chip supporting its Sandy Bridge generation of microprocessors. The chip is called Cougar Point, and it’s involved with the data connection to other devices within or outside the computer–hard drives or internal optical drives–using SATA connections. Intel says the performance of these connections could degrade over time. The systems affected have Core i5 and Core i7 quad-core chips.

The company has already stopped making the chip with the problem, but as is always the case with the incredibly complex process of semiconductor manufacturing, doing so is a costly process. Intel said it will reduce its revenue forecast for the first quarter by $300 million as it ends production of the old chip and gets volume of the new one ramped up. Total cost to repair and replace affected materials and computers already sold with the problem chip will be $700 million.

Those with long memories will recall Intel’s Pentium bug in the mid-1990s, which caused a big crisis of confidence in Intel chips, jokes from late-night TV hosts and a drop in the company’s stock price. This error is nothing like that. The company says the processor itself is unaffected.

Analysts are telling investors not to overreact. “Assuming pent-up demand for Sandy Bridge and mild competition, we think impact of this problem will be relatively small,” Standard & Poor’s analyst Clyde Montevirgen told clients in a note today. Mark Moskowitz of J.P. Morgan said it is likely that only a small number of end consumers are affected.

Meanwhile, Intel closed its $1.4 billion deal to acquire the wireless chip division of the German chipmaker Infineon, and said it expects to finally close its $7.7 billion acquisition of McAfee by the end of the quarter.

The combination of those two deals plus the chip trouble caused Intel to issue new guidance for the first quarter. It now expects first-quarter sales in the range of $11.3 billion to $12.1 billion, which is slightly higher than previous guidance. However it shaved three points off its gross margin forecast: The mid-point of the range is now 61 percent, down from 64 percent.

Intel shares are down more than one percent at the moment, while shares of rival Advanced Micro Devices are surging by more than five percent.

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