In a $33-million cash upfront deal announced on Friday, the Santa Clara-based McAfee Inc. is set to acquire the Cupertino-based 'whitelisting' technology vendor - Solidcore Systems Inc. As per the agreement, McAfee would pay another $14 million to Solidcore after its achievement of certain performance targets.

With Solidcore's main focus on protecting IT infrastructure from devices to the data center, McAfee said that takeover will fortify its position in the compliance market "by adding real-time enforcement that eliminates compliance drift."

The singular whitelisting technology from Solidcore is being used by over 100 financial institutions and 15,000 retail stores. The technology allows only certified, pre-sanctioned software to be run on servers, mobile, and other computer systems; thereby battling out worms, viruses, and other malware. The Solidcore products enable customers to protect ATMs, cash registers, and other retail market systems.

Talking about the acquisition in his corporate blog, Dave DeWalt, CEO of McAfee, said that with Solidcore, McAfee intends drawing together best-in-class technologies, thereby expanding McAfee's existing security portfolio further than signature-based anti-malware.

Elaborating on McAfee's plans of utilizing the Solidcore technology, DeWalt said: "We will combine dynamic whitelisting and application trust technology with leading McAfee antivirus, antispyware, host intrusion prevention, policy auditing and firewall technologies, to help customers more readily mitigate the risks associated with vulnerable or malicious applications downloaded by employees."