Norton Internet Security, Antivirus and 360 Being Retired?

Pups have crappy reputations. So dialing insight/reputation up tends to eliminate pups. In the case of my 2 kids that are pup-happy, it completely prevents them from impeding on their machines.

 

I don't see settings inside the product to dial up insight / reputation specifically. All I see is SONAR Advanced Mode, Heuristics and Low Risk handling. What do you mean exactly?

 

insight is in firewall settings under browser protection/download intelligence

 

Are you talking about Norton Security 2015? Because there are no settings to change Insight's sensitivity like it's possible in SEP there.

 

I don't see the settings to change Insight's Sensitivity either. Just on or off.

 

All you can do re: Insight Sensitivity is to change when NS will alert you to Aplications with Unproven Reputations - Firewall>Advanced Program Settings>: Allow,Suspicious Only,All.

Changing Sonar settings under Anti-Virus may also be useful as you can change the settings for Sonar as to what and when it will Remove Risks - Ask Me, High Certainty Only, All.

Just yesterday NS alerted me to what was obviously an adware program. I had my settings at the default Remove High Certainty Only. I wanted the program removed so I changed the settings to All and then reset to the default High Certainty Only. (NS makes no claim that it detects or removes PUPs. Only two security products I know of make such claim and a third does remove some PUPs that while generally are just an annoyance, also have the capability of acting maliciously-as the removal of non-malicious PUPs can lead to legal problems for the security product publisher.)

BTW: NS is establishing a limited reputation for removing some non-malicious programs and files no matter what settings you have,some of which have been proven to be essential, without asking or placing them in quarantine. This is perhaps the most serious complained about "feature" of NS-removing files without giving the user a choice to quarantine.

I have active subscriptions to two other highly rated security suites (I get bored easily). I had until very recently been using another because of its superior on demand and on access detection rates and some features of it's firewall.

Knowing that I have a clean PC, I recently switched to NS because of the recent results of a Dennis Technology Real World Internet Test demonstrating NS's excellent malware blocking capabilities.

http://www.dennistechnologylabs.com/reports/s/a-m/2014/DTL_2014_Q4_Home.1.01.pdf

(Some may claim the test is biased as Norton in the past sponsored one prior comparative test by Dennis, but this current test was not a sponsored test)

Norton has never bragged about it's scanning detection ability,which is one reason it does not participate in AV Comparatives tests - to be tested for any AV Comparative Test the vendor has to participate in all the individual AV-C Tests. Norton, among others, argue that a limited on demand test is a totally unrealistic way to test the protection offered by a security program, focusing more on blocking and the overall layered protection it offers. The excellent blocking ability of NIS had already been established, but the recent Dennis Test is the first to show the comparative blocking abilities of NS. (There is a prior comparative test covering a two month period - but in that test NIS was used for one month and NS was used for the second month.)

There is also another comparative test done by MRG Effitas - While it lists NS 2015 as one of the tested products, the test was for the 3rd quarter of 2014 and the beta version of the the product said to be tested was not released until Sept 23, 2014 and the Final Version on September 23, 2014, makes the description of the NS product tested dubious at best.

https://www.mrg-effitas.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/MRG-Effitas-360-Assessment-Q3-2014.pdf

 

Yeah, SEP has it. There is a Global setting for Insight, but also a Download setting for Insight (see image).

I'd be a little surprised if the setting is not hidden in NS 2015 somewhere..

 

And... in the MBAM sponsored test, Norton Internet Security did very well blocking exploits.

http://static-cdn.malwarebytes.org/assets/datasheets/2014-12-17/RCEMitigations.pdf

How much of the exploit blocking capabilities of NIS 21.4.0.13 (used in test) is integrated in SEP (what I use)... I'm not sure.

 

Norton has top kit anti-exploit capabilities for sure.

 

@Mayahana

You've said in the Asus thread over here that the "toolbar issue" seems to be fixed. Could you please elaborate?

Thank you

 

Can I activate Norton Security with a NIS key ?

 

No.

 

I am giving it a try and so far so good, browser speed is the best among all antivirus solution that I have ever tried in the past.

Using default settings for now ...

 

Norton is incredibly light, fast, and in my opinion - extremely effective due to the amazing anti-exploit, phishing, and reputation systems in it. Now the toolbar spam appears to be fixed if you install fresh. I installed it a couple days ago on 5-6 machines, and we've not seen a toolbar spam since. We let it install the toolbars, or do it manually, then go in and disable them, leaving them installed but disabled. Problem was solved for us using that method. Norton 2015 has never let a PUP/PUA past, I assume because the reputations of PUA's are too poor to escape notice from the reputation engine. Either way, my kids actually 'requested' to switch back to Norton because they were tired of having to 'worry' about stuff. With 'other' products I had to run PUA/PUP scans every few days and clean things up.

Do you guys leave the 'community' stuff on? So far I keep it off, but if it will enhance protection, or assist in improving overall product, I will turn it on.

 

As a consolation, if you have an active license for NIS and you buy NS, Norton will extend your purchased 1-year subscription to NS by the time remaining on your current NIS license.

It requires a call to Norton customer service to do this and is a simple issue for Norton to make effective and occurs nearly immediately.

The current cheapest price I am seeing for NS-5 devices is $49.99 at Amazon and Newegg.

Last I looked, it was being sold for $59.99 at the Norton Store

 

Norton Community Watch

https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us...9/solutions/v15462173_N360_N360RET_2015_en_us

 

I am loving it, Symantec has a winner with 2015 version.

I dont like toolbars, does disabling it decrease protection? I guess with this new architecture it wont be a problem.

 

About Norton Toolbar

https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us...9/solutions/v19802710_N360_N360RET_2015_en_us

 

Nope.

Norton's latest browser protection no longer requires a browser plug-in.

It's more of a notification rather than a protection element for browsing. Not sure about it's Facebook function.

 

http://www.symantec.com/page.jsp?id=star#secTab2
"File-based security has a long history as one of the cornerstones of our protection technologies. STAR continues to invest in and drive innovation to our file-based security to keep current with the latest developments on the threat landscape. Having infected files on a target machine is one of the main methods for threats to maintain a presence on a machine beyond the initial attack. Because of this, file-based protection will always be instrumental in detecting, neutralizing and removing threats on our customers’ machines."

 

I would be willing to disable Norton's scanning ability entirely, and run it as a Sonar/Insight/Reputation product. It's exceedingly difficult for me to infect a machine using just those aspects. I wonder how AV firms are going to be testing anything in the future given the blended threats, and blended, sometimes obscure detection methods? I think these 'run thousands of files' through AV's are pretty much a dead method of testing almost to the point of being irrelevant.

I still advocate a UTM as a primary solution, and with a plethora of consumer UTM solutions coming, AV's will be a secondary consideration at some point. We've successfully managed a fairly large automobile manufacture running nothing more than a large Fortigate appliance, and MSE on each desktop. We've not had to do any malware removals for 18 months on any of their machines. With these types of things happening I think many of us are starting to pay less and less attention to raw file scanner AV testing houses.

 

Norton Security is on sale for 49.99 at the Norton site right now. I chatted with support and they said first buy the license, then come back to chat and they will figure out a fair settlement on the remaining days left on the Internet Security license. But what is their formula? For example, how much credit will you get if you have 150 days left on the old license?

 

You will get 150 days credit added to Norton Security.

 

According to Hawki (post 615) Symantec will add the days remaining on your NIS license to your new NS license. AFAIK though there isn't a stated upgrade policy.

 

This is what I did: I had a little over a 1 year left on NIS. I downloaded the 30 day Trial Norton Security. I bought a NS License from Newegg $29.99. About 2 days before the Trial expired I added the key I got from Newegg. I chatted with Norton Chat to transfer the remaining days of NIS to NS. They did so with no problem. Today I have 712 days of NS.