A company was founded around 1987 as McAfee Associates, named for its founder John McAfee. Network Associates was formed within 1997 as a merger of McAfee Associates and Network General. In the season 2004, a major restructuring occurred. In the spring, a company sold the Magic Solutions business to Guide, a subsidiary of BMC Software. In the summertime of 2004, a company sold the Sniffer Technologies business to Network General. Besides, a company changed its title to McAfee to reflect its revolve about security-related technologies.

Among more corporations bought & sold by McAfee (ne Network Associates) is Trusted References Systems, which developed a Firewall Toolkit, which was a open source foundation for the commercial Gauntlet Firewall, which was late sold by McAfee to Secure Computing Corporation. Oddly, Network Associates, following of brief ownership of TIS Labs/NAI Labs/Network Associates Laboratories/McAfee Locate, was extremely influential in the globe of Open Source software, as that organization produced portions of the Linux, FreeBSD, and Darwin operating systems, developed portions of the BIND name server software, also when SNMP version 3.