BIOS: Technology Means Business

Symantec’s latest security offering is designed to safeguard consumers and small-business networks from spyware, phishing, stealth attacks, crimeware, viruses, software vulnerabilities, and other types of computer nasties. Norton Internet Security 2007 (Best Current Price: £24.95/$24.99) is a powerful security suite that includes the anti-virus and anti-spyware protection of Norton AntiVirus and safeguards against the latest online dangers by providing sophisticated new phishing protection, an enhanced firewall, and defence against software vulnerabilities.

Norton Internet Security 2007 is designed to work in concert with today’s most popular home networking equipment, complementing your security features to provide even greater levels of protection. In addition, an enhanced network detection component automatically provides you with separate security policies for the networks that you connect to. By automatically configuring the security settings for the type of network you connect to, you can take full advantage of your home networks and stay fully protected when connecting to more dangerous public networks. To avoid any possible mix-up it identifies networks by the physical address of the gateway rather than by IP address. It can even distinguish between wireless networks that have the same IP address and SSID name.

Symantec has raised the bar by delivering significant advancements in two key areas of its 2007 release: security technology and product performance. Today’s threat landscape shows large, widespread virus outbreaks being replaced by groups of higher frequency, low-visibility attacks aimed at financial gain rather than notoriety. Symantec has responded by developing relatively sophisticated new security features to help restore consumer confidence online and protection that automatically identifies and neutralises online threats without requiring you to make complicated decisions about your security.

Part of the changing threat landscape is the fact that virus writers are rapidly creating variations of existing malicious code rather than developing entirely new threats. Norton Internet Security 2007, or more specifically Norton AntiVirus 2007, addresses this growing trend by delivering potent new technology that blocks attacks from entire worm and virus families without requiring individual signatures for each new threat.

Leveraging newly developed security technology that detects these virus and worm families, Norton AntiVirus 2007 now provides proactive protection even before a new worm or virus is created and released. Norton AntiVirus’ defenses are kept current with protection updates delivered daily. In addition, Norton AntiVirus has been strengthened so that it can find new types of viruses that use rootkits to hide themselves from security software. This patent-pending technology detects camouflaged threats at all system levels, including the application, user mode, and kernel level.

Norton AntiVirus 2007 also incorporates enhanced scanning capabilities to ensure that high-risk spyware is detected and removed prior to installation. An improved and faster full system scan leverages foreground and background throttling modes giving you the option to move scanning to the background, requiring less processing power and letting you continue working on your computer without a major performance impact.

Norton Internet Security 2007 includes all the features found in Norton AntiVirus 2007 and enhances its detection, blocking, and removal tools with transaction security technology that helps to protect you against the latest online attacks. The new phishing protection feature helps to safeguard you from online identity theft by combining lists of known phishing Web sites with advanced heuristic technology to help safeguard you from visiting fraudulent Web pages.

The Intrusion Prevention feature offers protection against recently discovered vulnerabilities in the Windows operating system and other popular applications. These security holes can be shielded by Norton Internet Security much faster than it typically takes a vendor to release a patch to fix the problem. In fact, Symantec’s most recent Internet Security Threat Report noted that on average, virus writers are able to start exploiting these new security holes approximately six days after the disclosure of a vulnerability. With Norton Internet Security 2007, viruses, worms and hackers attempting to infect or invade a person’s computer through these vulnerabilities are immediately blocked from ever getting on the system.

Norton Internet Security’s enhanced firewall addresses one of the greatest frustrations users experience with current Internet security solutions - confusing firewall alerts. Most firewall applications today (including Zone Labs’ excellent ZoneAlarm) require you to decide whether to block or allow software on your computer from connecting to the Internet. Few have the expertise or the interest in making these decisions. The enhanced firewall in Norton Internet Security 2007 automatically configures itself to allow good applications yet blocks spyware, viruses, worms, crimeware and hackers from stealing sensitive information from your computer.

The suite scans files on demand, on access, and on schedule. If necessary it can eliminate entrenched files during Windows startup. By default, it also scans removable media on insertion and the A: drive at shutdown to foil boot-sector viruses. It strips viruses from e-mail coming in through POP3 or going out through SMTP, and has additional outbound checking for worm activity. You can even have it check files as they arrive through popular IM clients.

Viewing security status is more intuitive thanks to the newly designed user interface of the Norton Protection Center, and overall computer status is always visible via the Norton Status icon on the taskbar or the Windows system icon tray. In tests Norton Internet Security 2007 delivered performance enhancements in the areas of memory usage, boot time, scan speed, user interface (UI) launch speed, and HTTP download speed. It may let too much spam into the inbox, and its privacy and parental control features are limited (requires optional add-on pack), but those features aren’t as important as its decent firewall, anti-virus, and anti-spyware protection. Plus, many of us get our mail filtered at the server level anyway.

Norton Internet Security 2007 is backed by Symantec Security Response, a team of dedicated intrusion experts, security engineers, virus hunters, and global technical support teams that work in tandem to provide extensive coverage for enterprise businesses and consumers. Symantec Security Response provides you with comprehensive, global, 24x7 Internet security expertise. This security information is delivered to customers on a daily basis to ensure they remain fully protected. [7]

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