Norton Internet Security 2003 Review The Safe Buy Gets Safer Eric Grevstad
Mon 10/28/02 -- We've grumbled in this space that Microsoft Office has acquired the market-dominance status of a "safe buy" or best-known brand; that it costs more than rivals like Corel WordPerfect Office and OpenOffice.org; and that Microsoft's periodic upgrades to the suite tend to smooth rough edges or add relatively minor enhancements rather than spectacular new features. So, for similar reasons, we should probably grumble about Symantec's annual antivirus and firewall release, Norton Internet Security 2003. But we can't help giving it a thumbs-up. Just as you'll get an excellent productivity suite if you choose Office, you'll get first-class online protection from Norton Internet Security -- at a far easier-to-swallow price, $70 for the package or $40 for the upgrade from the 2002 edition.
Norton Internet Security (NIS) bundles Norton AntiVirus and Norton Personal Firewall (each $50 alone) with the personal-data-guarding and Internet-ad-blocking Norton Privacy Control, kid-protecting Norton Parental Control, and a new, minimal-but-useful e-mail filter called Norton Spam Alert.
As a gotta-have-it PC toolkit, it's frankly surpassed its stablemate Norton SystemWorks (which combines Norton AntiVirus with the aging Norton Utilities and CleanSweep), though in a perfect world, NIS would have the Internet cache- and cookie-cleanup functions found in SystemWorks -- and for that matter, Norton AntiVirus would include the company's firewall, as rival McAfee VirusScan now does, instead of continuing Symantec's a-la-carte strategy.
As is, Norton Internet Security does an impressive job of working like one product instead of a bunch -- and working with next to no intrusion, for the majority of users who'll follow its default setup of automatic, background operation for everything from catching and curing virus-infected downloads to fetching the latest program updates and virus signatures from Symantec's LiveUpdate servers (the price includes one year's subscription).
Normally, you'll see no more of NIS than a couple of icons in the system tray and alerts that pop into the lower right corner of your display when the firewall stops a snoop or the program scans a piece of outgoing mail for viruses (the only time we really noticed a slowdown in operations on our Pentium 4 desktop, by a matter of two or three seconds). If you like, you can put a Security Monitor on screen that gives quick access to the main menu, some NIS functions, and a panic button to block all Internet traffic, but you'll probably settle for the main menu, logically divided between AntiVirus and Internet Security submenus and between friendly "Configure" (mostly quick, prefab settings for low, medium, and high security) and expert "Options" tabs.
Additions to Norton AntiVirus' repertoire include scanning for viruses in instant messaging as well as e-mail attachments; the function works with Microsoft's Windows/MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger 4.7 or higher, and Yahoo Messenger 5.0 or higher, but ICQ, Trillian, and other IM users are out of luck.
A new Worm Blocking feature checks outbound e-mails so you won't be guilty of passing along the next Sircam; Symantec says the scheme, like its Script Blocking sibling, can recognize and stop malicious behavior even before a new baddie has been added to the signature list.
