This week Symantec made beta versions of its flagship Norton Internet Security 2010 and Antivirus 2010 products available for testing. We put NIS 2010 through its paces to see how it stacks up.
The 2010 editions of Norton introduce a security concept Symantec is calling "reputation".
Symantec describes reputation as the ability to leverage the anonymous data contributions of its millions of customers about the characteristics of the applications running on their systems. "This data enables Symantec to calculate a reputation safety score for each application," Symantec said in a statement. "Without ever having to ask the user, Symantec can statistically infer with an extremely high degree of accuracy the likelihood of an unknown application being good or bad."
We installed the beta of Norton Internet Security 2010 in a virtualised environment using Windows XP Service Pack 3 and Sun's Virtual Box 3.0.
(Credit: Renai LeMay/ZDNet.com.au)
