Advances in Our Use of AI Keep You Even Safer Online | McAfee Blog

AI is on your side. In fact, it’s kept you safer online for some time now. 

Now that scammers and hackers have gotten their hands on AI tools, they understandably get their share of headlines. Rightfully so. AI tools have helped them scale up their attacks while also making them look and feel increasingly sophisticated.  

Meanwhile, at McAfee, we’ve used AI as a core component of our protection for years now. As such, it’s done plenty for you over the years. AI has sniffed out viruses, malicious websites, and sketchy content online. It’s helped steer you clear of malicious websites too.  

Now we’ve made improvements to our AI-driven protection—and unveiled an all-new feature that takes full advantage of AI, McAfee Scam Protection. 

AI is indeed on your side. A quick tour will show you how. 

How AI keeps you safe: The plain language version. 

AI-driven protection quashes threats in three ways: 

1. It detects threats by referencing models of existing threats. This combats pre-existing threats and entirely new (zero-day) threats alike. AI can spot varieties of different threats by comparing them to features it’s seen before. For example, it’s like AI learning to identify different varieties of fruit. An apple is still an apple whether it’s a Fuji or Granny Smith. In that way, a virus is still a virus if it’s “Virus A” or the newly discovered “Virus Z.”
   
2. It further detects suspicious events and behaviors. AI provides a particularly powerful tool against zero-day threats. It analyzes the activities of applications for patterns that are consistent with malicious behavior. With that it can spot and prevent a previously unknown file or process from doing harm. In its way, AI says, “I’ve seen this sketchy behavior before. I’m going to flag it.”
   
3. It automatically classifies threats and adds them to its body of knowledge. AI-driven threat protection gets stronger over time. Because it learns. Something we call “threat intelligence.” The more threats it encounters, the more rapidly and readily it can determine if files want to do you no good. The body of threat intelligence improves immensely as a result. 

So, what does AI-driven protection look like in the real world?  

AI can identify malicious websites and links before you can connect to them. It can prevent new forms of ransomware from encrypting your photos and files. And it can let you know when the link you got in that text is a total fake.  

In combination with our security engineers and teams, AI really on your side.  

AI leads to powerful new protections. 

As part of our product launch a few weeks ago, we created advances in one or our AI-driven protections and released an entirely new AI-driven protection as well. 

McAfee Next-gen Threat Protection: McAfee’s AI-powered security just got faster and stronger. Our Next-gen Threat Protection takes up less disk space, reduces its background processes by 75%, and scans 3x faster than before. This makes your time online safer without slowing down your browsing, shopping, streaming, and gaming.  

As for strength, it offers 100% protection against zero-day threats and 100% against threats released in the past month (AV-TEST results, June 2023). You’ll find it across all our products that have antivirus included. 

McAfee Scam Protection: McAfee’s patented and powerful AI technology helps you stay safer amidst the rise in phishing scams. Including phishing scams generated by AI. It detects suspicious URLs in texts before they’re opened or clicked on. No more guessing if that text you just got is real or fake. 

And if you accidentally click on a suspicious link in a text, email, social media, or browser search, it blocks the scam site from loading. You’ll find McAfee Scam Protection across our McAfee+ plans. 

Above and beyond AI, more protections for your privacy and identity. 

In addition to AI-driven improvements, we also released several new features. Together they help you protect your privacy, lock down your identity, and set up your McAfee software for the best security. 

• Online Account Cleanup helps reduce the likelihood of being impacted by a data breach—because you have fewer accounts that can get hacked. Many internet users can have over 350 online accounts, many of which they might not know are still active. This feature runs monthly scans to find your online accounts and shows you their risk level to help you decide which to delete, and how to do so.​ 
• Social Privacy Manager helps safeguard your privacy on social media with personalized privacy recommendations based on your own preferences. It does the heavy lifting by adjusting more than 100 privacy settings across your social media accounts in just a few clicks. This ensures your personal info is only visible to the people you want to share it with.
  
  
• Transaction Monitoring helps spot unusual transactions which could be a sign of identity theft. Track deposits, withdrawals, and payments across your accounts, all in one place. (Included with McAfee+ Advanced and Ultimate.)
  
• Bank Account Takeover Monitoring provides alerts when your personal contact info changes on your banking account. If it wasn’t you, McAfee will guide you so you can take quick action. (Included with McAfee+ Ultimate.)
  
• Increased ID Theft Coverage now provides $2 million identity theft coverage, including 401K plans, stolen funds, and incurred expenses for you and your household members. Also includes $25K ransomware coverage. (Included with McAfee+ Ultimate.)
  
• McAfee Assist – Protection Setup connects you with one of our experts for a live session. You can call whenever it’s convenient for you to set up your account. No scheduling needed. (Included with McAfee+ Ultimate.) 

The great feeling you get when you have AI in your corner. 

Hackers might be making headlines as they cook up new attacks with AI, yet maybe it’s time to flip the script this once. AI works for you and can keep you safer online. 

Whether hackers try to hit you with ransomware or scammers pepper you with phony messages, AI can help keep you from harm. In conjunction with other advanced features that protect your privacy and identity, AI makes for powerful protection.