Spotted this one over at PCMag’s Security Watch blogs. It appears that Symantec has just posted public beta test copies of its upcoming Norton AntiVirus 2008 and Norton Internet Security 2008 products.
Excerpt from PCMag:
The new SONAR (Symantec Online Network for Advanced Response) claims to protect against emerging threats.
Symantec also claims speed improvements and a home-network-mapping feature (the benefits of which, in an AV product, are not clear).
SONAR apparently is a new heuristic-based threat detection feature that has been incorporated into the antivirus package. Whether it is a spanking new engine rebuilt from the ground up or just a name refresh from BLOODHOUND remains to be seen.
What Norton AntiVirus does is pretty self-explanatory. Norton Internet Security (NIS), on the other hand, is a suite of products consisting not only of the base Norton AntiVirus product, but also a personal firewall as well as antispyware and antiphishing components.
NIS also includes Norton Identity Safe and, honestly, my head is in a tizzy from the avalanche of product names already, so I hereby give it a pass here.
Anyway, it might be worth noting that Vista appears to be supported for both of the above-mentioned products, according to the systems requirement specifications.
Now to the interesting bit. In an earlier blog entry I wrote titled Symantec offers compensation for update fiasco, sentiment seemed to run high against Symantec’s products, especially pertaining to product bloat and even as the root cause of certain catastrophic system failures.
That was an eye-opener because, if there is one thing that stands out about TechRepublic readers, it would be that they stand out among all the forums and blogs that I know of to be the most rationale and factual folks around — honest!
Hence, I could not help but think that the recounted bad experiences might just be the result of the sheer number of people using Symantec products as opposed to it being mediocre.
I thought it might be interesting to do a poll on this, so here goes!
Any last words before hopping over to join the Friday night party? Join the discussion.
