What's coming in Norton 2011?

By Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 28 July 2010 11:58

Your IT - Home IT

Whether or not you're one of the 250,000 people already using the beta release of Norton Antivirus 2011, you may be interested in learning about the features coming in the 2011 editions of Symantec's consumer products, along with some free tools from the company.

The headline promises for Norton are speed and protection. Group product manager Dan Nadir says the company sets specific goals in both areas for each release of the products, and the 2011 versions will run faster and have a smaller memory footprint than their immediate predecessors, and the expectation is that the level of protection will be maintained.

"When you get 100% last year, the bar is set kinda high," he said, referring to the multiproduct test by Dennis Labs last year in which Norton 2010 was the only product (in a list of 10) to achieve 100% protection against 80 real-world threats.

According to Nadir, Dennis Technology Labs' work was "the only test that AMTSO has peer reviewed and given a 100% certification." The AMTSO (Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization) membership includes many of the well-known names in the anti-malware market, testing organisations, and the well-regarded Virus Bulletin.

The addition of a reputation system to the 2010 Norton lineup has resulted in the company building "the world's largest reputation [community]", with 56 million participants, according to Hall. As a result, more than 120 million files have reputation scores - both good and bad - in Symantec's database.

On an average day, some 65,000 distinct files are blocked by Norton products: 34,000 on the basis of reputation alone, 15,000 on heuristic detections and reputation, and 16,000 on behaviour and reputation, Nadir said.

There's improved support for automatic scanning of downloaded files (and more!) so please read on.