Symantec unveils 2 new Net security products

KUALA LUMPUR – Symantec Corp. has unveiled two of its most recent computer and Internet security products to the Southeast Asian media at the Paddock Club of the Sepang International Circuit here amid a backdrop of fast cars zooming past a sprawling racetrack where the fastest drivers compete for international stardom.

The choice of the venue, says the computer security company, was to drive home the point that these twin products debuting in the tech world is all about speed and performance.

David Freer, Symantec’s vice president for consumer business for the Asia-Pacific and Japan, and Jody Gibney, senior product manager for Norton Internet Security of Symantec Consumer Product, Global, were ushered into the stage by a stunning Porsche Cayman, the choice vehicle for delivering what the company claims as the “industry’s fastest and lightest consumer security products.”

Freer says the Norton Antivirus 2009 and Norton Internet Security 2009 are designed to combat threats in the new landscape as the battleground has shifted to websites and browsers.

“Attacks are now focused heavily on finding website flaws,” Freer explains, as “finding and using website flaws is easier than exploiting ‘traditional’ vulnerabilities.”

Attacks, according to Freer, have evolved over the years from viruses and worms duping users to opening attachments to phishers leveraging usage of online banking, to fooling users to install malicious programs and to attacking legitimate websites and infecting unsuspecting visitors.

“You can now go to your favorite newspaper and get infected,” he says.

Even as Web browsers are getting tougher, attackers are starting to focus on browser plug-ins and multimedia-based attacks. This, he explains, is due to the fact that people are spending a significant amount of time online. As people view and download multimedia more often, attackers use this to dupe people into installing fake codecs and setup apps, which in turn lead to the installation of trojans and other malware and software.

“The threat landscape is now driven by consumer behavior... the Web is emerging as the platform and this means that attacks will be language- and server-specific,” he stresses.

Zero impact performance

In designing the 2009 Norton Antivirus and Norton Internet Security package, Gibney disclosed that their number one goal is performance.

“The reason weselected performance is due to a number of trends in the Web landscape,” begins Gibney. “More than price, functionality is now key as PCs are now used more as an entertainment device. People are also keeping their PCs longer. Parents are handing down their old PCs to their kids.”

These factors usher in a lot resource issues, according to Gibney. In a survey Semantec conducted, she says around 40 percent of home users have PCs with only 512 MB of memory but with 75 percent resource utilization. “People don’t like interruptions in their work, they like speed but with limited memory and high resource utilization, the only way to go is to achieve ‘zero impact’ performance.”

This means security software that installs and scans very fast, takesup very little memory space, and has least boot time. “We just don’t want improvements, we want groundbreaking change,” says Gibney.

She discloses that the new Norton products have the fastest installation speed in the industry at only 52.77 seconds. Other key improvements include boot time of 33.74 seconds, which is 26 percent faster; total scan speed of 32.6 seconds, or five times faster; memory usage of only 6.92 MB, which is eight times lighter; and daily activities taking up a mere 301.25 seconds or 28 percent faster.

The new feature in the Norton 2009 that dramatically reduced scanning time is called Norton Insight technology, which removes the need to scan all the PC files. In this new scheme, only untrusted applications will be analyzed by Norton, which explains the enormous gain in performance.

Gibney gives assurance that even with the selected file scanning method, the rate of threat detection remains the same. One advantage is that because of reduced scanning time, the software has minimal impact on the system and daily activities. She explains that the technology works through a combination of statistics, community intelligence, whitelisting, and SONAR behavior analysis.

David Hall, Symantec regional consumer product marketing manager for the Asia-Pacific, explains further: “Sixty-five percent of the applications on my PC are also on your PC. What we do is create a whitelist of common and popular files used by the Norton community. These files are updated regularly.”

This is harnessing the power of community intelligence. A program is considered trusted, according to the Symantec executives, based on the Norton community standard or if backed up by Norton research. Freer says the Norton community currently has 17 million users worldwide.

Norton 2009, however, includes a protection system powered by multi-layered technologies that work to stop threats that can impact the PC or the computing experience. It also features a new user interface that makes it easier for people to use and allows users to find most product features in one click.

“When you are busy, we get out of the way,” says Gibney. This is made possible by a smart scheduler that scans updates and other activities when the PC is idle. Active processes also retreat into the background within “milliseconds” of user activity.

Beyond security

The new threat landscape as well as recent developments in the Web scene presented an opportunity for Symantec to also revamp its security strategy in three areas: online storage, family safety, and services.

With the recent acquisition of SwapDrive, a leader in file sharing and backup services, Symantec aims to strengthen its online storage for consumers in high-growth markets through Norton 360, which allows users to access data anywhere. Currently, Freer discloses that there are now petabytes of data already stored and around 5.5 million customers worldwide are backing up their files.

Another area where Symantec has been focusing on is its approach to family safety on the Web. “It is very hard for parents to monitor what their children do on the Web. This presents an opportunity for us to revamp parental controls,” Freer says, adding that the Symantec approach is collaborative and not designed to spy on the child.

There is also a growing segment of customers who want more than software. “Services will be a significant part of our business. But would you (the consumer) trust us to get into your computer?” says Freer. A lot of people, he says, just want things to work properly and from time to time needs a simple diagnosis of what is wrong with their PCs or software.

Currently, Symantec provides unlimited e-mail, chat and phone support for one year from initial product installation. The Norton Antivirus 2009 will retail in the Philippines for P2,300 for a one PC license and P3,630 for three PCs. The Norton Internet Security 2009, on the other hand, has a suggested retail price of P2,880 for one PC and P4,030 for three PCs.