Norton Internet Security 2011 Review

If Nor­ton Inter­net Secu­rity 2011 is any­thing link the 2010 ver­sion it will cost around $70 for a one year license and will offer pro­tec­tion in the fol­low­ing areas:

• Anti Virus — This is the tra­di­tional real-time virus scan­ner that mon­i­tors the activ­ity of mali­cious files, and offers an alert if some­thing is spotted.

  The down­side is that it very rarely catches a virus, even after the virus has com­pro­mised the com­puter and dis­abled Nor­ton Inter­net Secu­rity 2011 altogether.

• Anti Rootkit — Rootk­its are becom­ing increas­ingly pop­u­lar, and I would esti­mate that by 2012, rootk­its will be the dom­i­nant form of com­puter virus protection.

  As far as best anti rootkit pro­tec­tion is con­cerned, Nor­ton does not even get a men­tion. Again, just as in the Anti-virus cat­e­gory, Nor­ton Inter­net Secu­rity 2011 can only find the obvi­ous stuff, unfor­tu­nately with thou­sands of viruse vari­a­tions sur­fac­ing daily, most peo­ple are not infected by the obvious.

• Bot Pro­tec­tion — Use­less jar­gon to make you think Nor­ton Inter­net Secu­rity 2011 is pro­tect­ing your com­puter in ways the com­pe­ti­tion is not.
• Nor­ton Threat Insight — More mar­ket­ing jar­gon. Most secu­rity suite will let you learn more about infected files that reside on your com­puter, but only a few keep the meli­cious files off of your com­puter so that you do not need insight about hem in the first place.
• Pro­fes­sional Strength Anti­Spam — Does adding the word pro­fes­sional make the Anti­Spam mod­ule more use­ful or pow­er­ful? No.

  If you use web­mail like most of us do for our per­sonal accounts, the anti spam fea­ture will not pro­tect you at all. If you are an Out­look user your com­pany more than like has a good spam fil­ter on their mail server.

  Do using the anti spam is either redun­dant or use­less or both.

• Nor­ton File Insight — Advanced users might appre­ci­ate scru­ti­niz­ing sus­pi­cious files, but most advanced users don’t trust Nor­ton. Other users would prob­a­bly only usse this fea­ture to trou­ble shoot a poten­tial virus issue with tech­ni­cal sup­port, which prob­a­bly mean you’re using the fea­ture too late, and Nor­ton has failed you.
• Nor­ton™ Safe Web — Inte­grated web browser pro­tec­tion, that pro­tects you from web sites with mali­cious code. Plau­si­ble idea, but it takes a tool­bar to do it’s job which means less screen real estate. You’d be bet­ter off using Google Chrome, which has mali­cious code pro­tect buily in, in the foem of sandboxing.
• Smart Fire­wall — Nor­ton Interner Net Secu­rity 2011 pro­vides a fire­wall that attempts to work behind the scene and not alert you of the deci­sions it has made while you surf the Internet.

  This is a good idea on paper, but when you turn on the com­puter to browse the Inter­net, and get the “Page can­not be dis­played” error. It would help to know the NIS 2011 blocked all traffic.

• Pulse Updates — Sounds like a re word­ing of Live­Up­date, which seems to never update daily, hich doesn’t mat­ter when Syman­tec is always behind the ball hen it comes to pro­tect­ing users from recent threats.
• Net­work Mon­i­tor­ing — Use­less. It is sup­pose to pro­tect you from threats that may come from other com­put­ers on your net­work. Seems it’s only good at screw­ing up your Home­group (Win­dows 7) or your work­group file shar­ing (Win­dows XP, Vista)
• Spy­ware Pro­tec­tion — Redundant.
• Iden­tity Pro­tec­tion — Use­less, and never used becaus most peo­ple don’t under­stand how it works.
• Nor­ton Res­cue Tools –
• Nor­ton Bootable Recov­ery Tool — A optional DVD that can be cre­ated to help you remove viruses from your com­puter AFTER Nor­ton Inter­net Secu­rity has let them through.
• Nor­ton Power Eraser — Pre­ston from PC World summed up Nor­ton Power Eraser by stating:

  … Nor­ton Power Eraser is a more aggres­sive sys­tem scan­ner than the nor­mal Nor­ton mal­ware scan­ner and is likely to return more false pos­i­tives. So it’s a good idea, before tak­ing its advice to kill a pro­gram, to do a search on what it finds to get a bet­ter sense of whether it’s really mal­ware. For exam­ple, on my Win­dows 7 sys­tem, Power Eraser reported “shell­fold­er­fix” as being mal­ware, when in fact it is add-on soft­ware that helps Win­dows bet­ter remem­ber the size and posi­tion of Win­dows Explorer windows.

  This defeats the set it and for­get it sim­plic­ity that anti-virus pro­grams should have evolved into at this point. If you have to turn to Google to scru­ti­nize a list of files with awk­ward names to deter­mine what is mali­cious and what is not, then you should not put this in the hands of nor­mal users. This fea­ture will either be ignored of at worst cause users to need addi­tional tech­ni­cal sup­port because they removed impor­tant files that ulti­mately ren­dered their com­puter unusable.

I am not a big fan of Nor­ton as you can tell. It’s dif­fi­cult to improve upon a pro­gram that has been fatally flawed since it’s incep­tion. I believe Nor­ton Nor­ton Inter­net Secu­rity 2011 main prob­lem is that it has shifted towards being more of a tool that helps you remove viruses after you have been infected instead of keep­ing you from being infected in the first place.

If you are going to buy an anti-virus pro­gram buy one that focuses on pre­ven­tion. You’ll do bet­ter with AVG Inter­net Secu­rity if you ask me. It seems to do every­thing right.