It's Symantec's turn to take security to the cloud

A few months back McAfee announced the release of Artemis, a cloud-based threat-prevention system that deals with software in the system based on their reputation. Observing how a piece of software interacts with the Operating System, the threat prevention system could decide if the software is benign or malicious.

Putting the knowledge of all the pieces of software, not just the bad ones, makes threat prevention system to act in a pre-emptive way in stopping a software from corrupting the system. And the fact that it operates on the cloud -not on the hard disk of the system- means that users of anti virus systems need not worry about applications occupying large amounts of space.

After McAfee, it is now Symantec’s turn to announce a similar technology in their latest release: Norton 2010. If assertions of Symantec were to be believed, Norton 2010’s “reputation-based identification” is far smarter than Artemis.  “Unfortunately, our product has the same name as McAfee,” said David Freer, Vice President, Consumer Business Unit, Symantec Asia Pacific and Japan.

“What McAfee offers is basically ‘old wine in new bottle’. They have taken all their old anti virus systems on the cloud and offers it as reputation based identification. On the contrary, we have worked on our technology for three years from ground-up and have made it more comprehensive threat protection with 100 per cent security to systems.”

Norton 2010, Symantec says, has been created with complete understanding of the new-generation challenges. With cyber attacks focussed more on stealing financial information and selling it online, security over the internet has assumed more importance. With certain newer features, it is also possible for users to monitor activities such as downloads.

“Over the last few years, our design philosophy has been to create a light weight, faster and agile security system which doesn't slow down or interfere with the way a user works,” said David Hall.   Norton Download Insight - one of the technologies available in Norton2010- uses extensive online intelligence systems based on reputation to pre-empt attacks on PC. It also analyses reports on the safety of new files and applications before users install and run them. Another technology, Norton Threat Insight,  provides details on threats that have been detected on the PC , including useful information on its origin and when it was initially encountered.

Symantec has also said that several independent labs have evaluated Norton 2010 for faster performance and robustness.  “AV-Test.org, one of the most reputed third-party testers, have said that Norton 2010 has produced 'excellent results’ in their testing of traditional detection methods like heuristics and signatures and dynamic detection against tougher zero-day threats, which escapes traditional methods,” Freer said.