Norton 'Quorum' adds reputation to security software

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 07 July 2009 07:32

Business IT - Security

Reputation is also used in the antispam and parental control aspects of the product.

"Symantec is in a unique position to bring this approach to market due to our unmatched installed base and the fact that we've had teams of engineers developing and refining this technology for the past three years," said Rowan Trollope, senior vice president of Symantec's consumer business unit.

"No other vendor's approach to consumer protection comes close. Our new approach changes the 'rules' by both enhancing traditional security techniques to make them more aggressive and by making it dramatically more difficult for attackers to evade detection by simply changing their malware," he added.

Symantec officials also claim that new alerts in the 2010 editions do a better job of explaining events in plain language, while still allowing more technically oriented users to obtain greater detail on request.

One of the motivations for this change is the incidence of malware posing as software updates or codecs. Symantec found that traditional alert messages failed to convey clearly what had happened.

The beta releases are available to the public (Norton Internet Security 2010 and Norton AntiVirus 2010).

In related news, Symantec has announced that all flagship Norton products including Norton 360, Norton Internet Security and Norton AntiVirus are planned to be Microsoft Windows 7 compatible as of the general availability of the new operating system. Users with valid product subscriptions will automatically receive the compatibility updates at no additional cost.