The service offers light footprint, download-friendly versions of existing McAfee firewall, anti-virus and privacy software.
Network Associate's Asia Pacific marketing manager Allan Bell says a major problem for consumers is their failure to update their software on a regular basis.
"The issue is that people say they've got anti-virus [software] but they don't have up to date anti-virus," he said.
All of the online software is pre-configured for automatic, background updates. The idea is more or less to provide users with idiot proof software.
"While consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the computer security dangers on the Internet, they require hassle-free... software," Bell said.
The chopped-down packages are designed to be dial-up friendly. Users that don't want to spend hours downloading software only have to contend with a total package size of around 8.3Mb for all three components.
Speaking at the launch of the consumer tools, Internet Industry Association Peter Coroneos said unprotected consumers with broadband connections represent a threat to critical infrastructure because they have a potential to be used as launching pads in distributed denial of service attacks. He said more needed to be done to cater for the end user's needs.
30,000 Australian customers have already signed up to McAfee's subscription site in the US. The only difference with the local version is the payment of fees in Australian dollars and the provision of support locally.
Customers with accounts in the US will not be automatically transferred to the Australian site due to privacy contraints, but users will be made aware of the new local site.
Bell also said customers would not been signed up by default to a feature of the software that is used to collect real time virus data and send it to McAfee for research due to privacy restrictions. However a third of all customers sign up for the feature anyway, he said.
It would be nice if you posted URLs in such articles