RSSSymantec launches Norton Security 10 and Quorum technology
By Jacqueline Emigh | Published September 10, 2009, 6:15 PM
With ID theft reaching increasingly alarming proportions, Symantec this week rolled out a battery of new tools geared to helping PC users fight victimization, at a press event Wednesday in New York City.
The company's latest round of heavy artillery includes new Quorum technology, integrated into the now available Norton Internet Security 10 and Norton Antivirus 10, plus a free tool known as the Norton Online Risk Calculator.
According to Rowan Trollope, senior VP of consumer products and marketing at Symantec, traditional anti-malware tools are growing ineffective against ID theft. Thieves have learned to slip beneath the radar of the conventional approach of identifying malware based on matching software to signature databases of known threats.
Now, the bad guys are making subtle changes to existing exploits and using each type of attack sparingly. They "take a threat and modify it and send it out to five users," Trollope said last night.
To start getting "beneath the radar," Symantec's new Quorum technology is aimed at identifying risks based on additional factors, such as whether a software program is digitally signed, which download site it comes from, and whether the program is so new that nothing much is known about it.
Quorum combines "attributes" such as digital signatures and software age, sources and prevalence with specially designed software algorithms to determine a "reputation" for the file. Users are then warned if they are among first to have downloaded a new program, for example.
Symantec also leveraged last night's event as a way of overcoming Norton's own long-time reputation as a PC "memory hog." Trollope acknowledged that to help outgrow this legacy, Symantec began speeding Norton's performance in version 9. "We are [now] the fastest," he maintained.
Also in Norton 9, Symantec introduced a performance monitoring tool which graphically depicts the amount of memory Norton is consuming in relation to other software programs.
But in Norton 10, you can now drill down more closely to see how much memory is being used by the various other programs. During a demo, a Symantec staffer showed how Microsoft's Internet Explorer was eating up more memory than Norton or any other software application on her PC.
Also last night, Symantec took reporters through a virtual tour of how crooks use tools such as IRC chat to ply their trade.
Symantec also this week announced Norton Online Risk Calculator, an online risk assessment tool for determining your own risk of attack and quantifying how much your information and assets are worth.
Internet crime now happens about once every quarter of a second, officials estimated at the event last night. In one instance we saw demonstrated Wednesday, an ID theft victim named Kashima Brown detailed how she almost lost $10,000 through an online phishing scheme.
Austin Berglas, a special agent for the FBI, attested to how white collar criminals -- even those without technical backgrounds -- are now able to make lucrative businesses out of trading credit card numbers and other tidbits of consumers' personal info over the Internet black market.
"It's like a shopping market, where you can buy and sell anything you want," said the FBI agent.
Due to supply and demand factors, a UK credit card number will fetch more on the black market than a US credit card, noted one Symantec staffer during the event.
I just thought everything I have read was Norton was it, than beta was going to last 14 days on Nortons 2010 and now all I read is Norton just (sucks) ok. who is the best?
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|Has anyone that's used Eset AV 4 used Norton 2010 and arrived at some sort of opinion?
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|Was the best, then wasn't, now is probably the best again.
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|I've never been a fan of Norton products. First one I ever used was SystemWorks 2001 on Windows 98. It worked fine, as long as you didn't set the utilities like System Doctor to run in the background. The Windows 3.1 version of Norton 4.0 runs great on my old AT system with a AMD-x586
After the DOS-based OS era though, Norton has been a disappointment. I tried NIS2005 and 2007, and a demo of 360, but sure enough, they made the system slow. Not even considering 2010. Now using free McAfee from Comcast, which isn't bad on resources except when updating (burns over 200MB of RAM during updates).
When I fix computers, so many people with slow systems ask what i did to fix them. Many times, its "Removed Norton". AVG, Antivir, NOD32, or MAfee always tend to run better.
Other Norton issues I've seen include Norton denying access to files for the malware i was trying to remove. The malware still ran fine, even though i couldn't touch the files. Thanks Norton for over complicating a simple task.
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|I've worked with Norton/Symantec products for over a decade, and I've seen not only a remarkable downfall in the quality of their software, but their QA and support as well. It is support this past year that finally pushed me away from Symantec for good. I might still recommend them to the occasional user to get the user off my back, but I don't plan on continuing to use their products in a business sense. They even still spam me, which solidifies my decision.
Anyone who has used Backup Exec or SEP in the past 2 years knows what I am talking about.
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|couldnt agree more... i jumped ship about 2 years ago and havent looked back.
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|With system memory theft reaching very low proportions, Symantec this week rolled out a battery of new tools geared to helping PC users become victims of uber memory theft.
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|Norton has a lot to make up for, that's for sure; not the least of which is the shameful job Symantec did, milking what was obtained from Peter Norton Computing and bleeding it dry, doing nothing to keep up with technology advances, and then letting the Norton Utilities, once a near necessity for any serious user's toolkit, become a joke. To top that Symantec bought and buried the competition, PCTools (the REAL PCTools, from Oregon, and destroyed XTree software as well.
As far as coming back to the reality of today is concerned...they will never find a way onto any of my machines as long as it is necessary to distribute a separate removal program, simply to remove the 'sins' of the poorly designed install and uninstall routines built into the main programs.
If they want to regain a name, they could start by being a good computing citizen, and making sure their products play nicely, and leave no traces when removed.
Until then, they will have to rely on the corporate buffoons who still install this product based on the reputation of a product from 15 years ago, never bothering to think that perhaps there are free solutions that perform better.
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|One can debate the pros and cons of whether Norton is now a better product and not a resource hog (I personally think they have gotten better) but the biggest obstacle that Norton faces is the right perception that, after the sale to Symantec, their product line went into the toilet both on security and resource use. Overcoming that perception is going to be difficult even if 2010 is a great product. Perception rather than reality is oftentimes more of a problem both in the tech sector and life than reality and I am not sure that Symantec can overcome this issue. Finally, the other problem facing not only Symantec but other security program manufactures is the increasing security that free programs are showing. If a free program can come within spitting distance of a paid program then free will always win out.
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|In any business...
Perception *is* reality.
That's why marketing is so important, as is not releasing *crap*. MSFT should have learned that with ME, but threw Vista out there. Now they have some serious marketing headway to make to change that perceived reality. Norton needs to hop on that bandwagon...big time.
(like...drop the name, create a new, small, lightweight, efficient, client...)
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|Bloat 2.0 after resetting Bloat 1.0 in Norton 2009.
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|So let me get this straight: they said they trimmed their software, removed the fat, but... implemented a resource usage monitor into it? A security software suite that monitors memory usage? Something doesn't quite add up there.
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|I believe you mean Norton Internet Security 2010 and Norton AntiVirus 2010. In terms of versioning, NIS 2010 is actually NIS 17, not 10.
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|You should have reset 360 to defaults and rebooted.
I've found the latest generation of Norton to be great on PCs.
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|True, but I wouldn't include 360 in that category. It's bloated and buggy compared to NIS, and there's no good reason for it to be so. It just is.
NIS2009 though is very good. In my test, NIS2010 was marginally slower... but perhaps they've fixed it since the beta.
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|I thought Norton 360 was billed as using a lot less memory?
Well anyway, 2 days ago I was fixing a friends new laptop (cheap laptop but it gets the job done) and it came pre-installed with Norton 360 2.0. I couldn't for the life of me get the laptop working in wireless mode... it even showed reaching the internet in Vista's network and sharing center. So after wasting 2 hours playing with all kinds of network settings, I decided to completely uninstall Norton 360 from the system (a process that took at lest 30 minutes btw) - even though the software was disabled from Windows startup and it's service was disabled, it did not show up at all in task manager - Norton 360 was causing the laptop to brake the wireless networking. After an uninstall and a reboot, launched Firefox and the internet was magically enabled.
Thanks Symantec - can I have my 2 hours back? :s
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|See above. N360 is crappy, and v2 is even crappier. 3.5 is OK, but I would STRONGLY recommend using NIS instead. 360 doesn't offer any serious advantages anyway: backup is built-in to Windows now, as is auto-defrag. Windows prompts when you're running low on disk space for a cleanup... so... why have 360?
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|Why have any of it?
Almost everything you need is built into Windows and you can use Microsoft Security Essentials for malware (which has, at most, taken a whopping 4% CPU on any of my systems...).
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|I have to admit quorum sounds interesting and I wouldn't mind giving a go. But my problem with Norton is how much memory it used, but all of the resources. Just 8 months ago I helped a neighbor who bought a brand new computer but it was running slow. As soon as I uninstalled Norton software the speed of her computer almost doubled, then I got rid of a lot of other junk, ask.com toolbar and so forth and boom a brand new computer, HP sucks :)
As for a lot of the problems it's people and their stupidity mixed with greed. It's not like a lot of the scams etc. are really all that sophisticated not by a long shot yet there is no lack of victims that fall for it. Even now somebody is falling for the nigeria 419 scam come on how stupid can one be. The obvious spam, no lack of stupid people falling for those. So Norton and any other security company can try to combat the problem, but the real problem and only real solution is to find a way to make some people a little smarter, good luck on that. And don't get me started on companies with no or weak security measures.
I could go on and on about this but I won't :
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|I'm surprised that you found a recent vintage Symantec product to be a resource hog. In my application, Symantec AV has had virtually no discernible impact on my PC's performance.
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|I am an independent computer engineer and I hate their Software so much that If I find it installed on a PC it gets uninstalled completelly and advise my clients to use the install cds as drinks coasters cus that all they are fit for...
I will not have the software in the house ... as they have admitted its bloated and most of the stuff is unnecessary .. rember anti crash .. wel they should have called it crash my pc cus that all it ever did use KIS 2010
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|"Hey, I just uninstalled your security suite. You now have to spend more money on another or use a product that is free but might contain a few more bugs. Sorry, but my personal opinion of this program has led me to remove it from your computer regardless of your thoughts on it."
Sorry, if a person I hire to fix my PC (Never would, I can fix my own) uninstalls something without advising me or asking prior to doing so will be fired and NOT paid.
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|its normally because norton has let through a virus or trojan or just generally does not work that i get called out ... remember norton 2005 well when 2006 came out people ugraded and it would just make windows completely unbootabale ... same thing happened with 2006-2007
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