The Hindu : National : Safe surfing now calls for three-pronged defence

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Nov 07, 2004

National

National

Safe surfing now calls for three-pronged defence

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE, NOV. 6. This is almost like the tag line of that classic chiller film, Jaws. Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the murky waters of cyberspace, the Great White Shark of the World Wide Web comes snapping back, crunching your PC's puny anti-virus defence, like it was made of paper.

This year, the major manufacturers of Net security products — Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro — are all telling lay customers like you and me: It's no good just to install an anti-virus tool. To defend yourself against Internet sharks, you need a three-pronged defence — like a triple antigen — or Lord Shiva's `trishul.'

And what is this 3-in-1 strategy? It means installing a virus buster, a spam buster and a firewall, at the very least. Which is why the leading providers are today bundling such tools into a Net security suite, much like the all-in-one office suites that first appeared in the early 1990s.

Security system

Symantec, makers of the Norton range of information security systems, has made available to The Hindu for evaluation, its range of 2005 products for the home and small office, which have just become available in India. Of these, the product they recommend for the home computers of lay users, is Norton Internet Security (NIS) which is essentially a bundle of three main products that can also be bought separately:

a) "Norton AntiVirus" has additional features in the new 2005 version to neutralise the new `blended' threats that were so big this year and attacked the computer through multiple points. It has also been beefed up to address Internet `worms' like Sasser and Blaster by blocking the multiple ports into a PC.

b) Spam — the flood of unsolicited junk mail that hassles most email users every time they download their messages — is specifically targeted by "Norton AntiSpam." The new version allows you to block all messages in specific languages. You can also block English if you only use your email for Indian languages. It also tries to identify messages from false email addresses, something it can do because Symantec acquired the specialist anti-spam product Brightmail earlier in the year, which monitors 300 million mailboxes worldwide, to trace a pattern of spamming.

c) "Norton Personal Firewall" `hides' your PC, making it invisible on the Net to Trojan Horses and other attackers. If they still try, it blocks suspicious traffic and allows you to decide whom to allow inside.

In addition to these three tools, the suite also includes parental and privacy controls you can set up, particularly in homes where children and adults share a PC. When this correspondent installed NIS 2005, the 200MB installation from the CD could be fully configured in about 15 minutes. Compared to the 2004 version, it is more intuitive and does not intrude so often to inform you that a "TCP/IP stack overflow" is attacking your PC. It just solves the problem.

"Today's customers are saying: `Tell me what you have done; don't make me do it.' Companies have IT managers. You are my manager, so do your job." This, says Symantec's regional product manager for Asia Pacific, Norm Kohlberger, is the message users sent after the previous release. The 2005 NIS tries to do just that.

NIS is now available in India for Rs. 3,618. The three individual tools can also be bought separately for around Rs. 2,000 to Rs. 2,500 each.

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