NEW YORK CITY – Symantec Corp. has unveiled the beta of its Norton 2009 product line-up that promises the fastest and lightest security in the market as well as enhancements and new features that will help consumers better protect themselves against identity theft, data leakage and their PCs from the latest malware threats.

“[Customers have been saying that] security products today are too slow and bog down the computer, which is a reputation that Norton had in the past,” said Tom Powledge, vice president of Symantec’s consumer products division. “Performance is the number one reason why people switch [security] brands.”

Norton products have had an unenviable reputation among many consumers as system hogs that slow down performance. The goal of Norton AntiVirus and Norton Internet Security 2009 is to reverse this – to have zero impact on performance on PC without sacrificing any of the security.

Norton Internet Security 2009 will have a boot impact of 10 seconds, which means less time strain at the Windows logo, explained Powledge. The one-click install will finish in about 60 seconds. It took five minutes to boot for the 2008 edition.

He added that the net throughput for Norton Internet Security 2009 is targeted to be 70 per cent faster than the industry average, ensuring there will be no slow down on a person’s Internet connection.

Impacting Norton’s performance in the past was the usage of the Microsoft Installer that provided a lot of unnecessary overhead.

“We did a major architectural decision on how to install the prods where we [now] use our own proprietary install technology,” said Powledge.

He added that the faster performance of the Norton products have been tested on low end single core systems with 256 MB of RAM. High systems will feature faster performance.

A new user interface on Norton features a gauge to let users know how much system resources are being used by Norton.

Norton Insight, a new feature that is driven by intelligence from the Norton community, uses a research and SONAR behavior rating that accelerates scanning by avoiding trusted programs and files.

“What we are doing is gathering all those files and creating lists of files that we know are good files and not infected. We are taking the digital fingerprint of those files and storing them in a database that can be accessed on the Internet. It allows us to reduce the amount of processing overhead to be done on computer “said Powledge.

He further explained that Norton Insight determines what percentage of files are trusted and what percentage need to be scanned by Norton, and that this new model reduces scanning of more than 65 per cent of programs on an average system. When a file is determined to be trusted, Norton will not scan that file anymore unless it changes. “We analyze only what we don’t know or don’t trust.”

In addition, both Norton Internet Security 2009 and Norton Anti-Virus 2009 will publish new virus definitions every five to 15 minutes. “Our new Pulse Updates stream small, frequent updates in near real-time with no performance impact,” Powledge said.

Another concern people had about security software was the amount of pop-up alerts that they didn’t know how to deal with, so they just allowed everything, thereby creating a security risk.

The 2009 Norton products would feature Smart Scheduling, which is an overhaul of all activity scheduling so that tasks run when computer users are not using their computer.

“It stays out of the user’s way by doing scans, LiveUpdate, Norton Insight queries and other activities when they will not interrupt user activities,” noted Powledge.

As well, there is a new auto silent-mode for movies, games and presentations that when you enter into a full-screen more, alerts and non-critical notifications will be held or dropped causing no disruptions.

“When you are not using the product’s features, security software should neither be seen nor heard unless there is a problem,” Powledge added.

Also new for both Norton 2009 products is browser protection for Internet Explorer and Firefox as well as new zero-day exploit blocking. Additionally, there are new features for blocking multimedia and other plug-in attacks.

Identity Safe is Norton’s redesigned tool bar that protects users from phishing attacks and now also offers website authentication to protect user name and password. Powledge explained that it is an advanced favorite lists that features one-click login to manage user name and password for frequently visited sites.

“There is no need to type in [user name and password] therefore no chance of keystroke loggers capturing information,” he added.

Other new enhancements include improved network security map that looks at wireless security to determine if it is secure and help get it secure. New point and click firewall configuration makes it easier to do file and data sharing. As well, there is new remote monitoring that will report health and status through a visual map of all networked devices that are running Norton products.

There are also new anti-bot features, new tools for fixing deep infections and a recovery tool that does bootable CD scans and removes threats from outside Windows. New Bloodhound Heuristics removes the most aggressive malware and heavily infected systems.

The beta of Norton Internet Security and Norton AntiVirus 2009 are available now. General availability is slated for September.

This column was written by Vanessa Ho of ConnectIT

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