Today's online thieves will take advantage of any opportunity to steal anything you've got: your money, your identity, even your good name. And their methods are getting more devious and sophisticated every day. In fact, Symantec blocked an average of more than 245 million attempted malicious code attacks across the globe each month during 2008(2). Phony emails, fake web sites and online ads trick innocent victims into divulging personal data like social security and credit card numbers. Cyber criminals then sell the information to the highest bidder on the online black market. Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) knows that cyber crime is real crime, that's why today, the maker of Norton security software, is bringing to market a completely unique approach to online security with Norton 2010.

New Reputation-Based Technology - Codenamed: Quorum

Norton Internet Security 2010 and Norton AntiVirus 2010 leverage a new model of security, codenamed Quorum, to attain unmatched detection of new malware and advance far beyond traditional signature and behavior-based detection. Specifically, Quorum takes the greatest weapon cyber criminals have in their arsenal -- their ability to generate unique pieces of malware at an alarming rate -- and turns that very weapon against them.

Today, cyber criminals are furiously writing and then rewriting new and unique pieces of malware, hoping to stay under the radar of threat signatures for as long as possible. With Quorum, the very uniqueness of a file and its attributes is what helps us identify it as new malware. More than three years in the making, Quorum tracks files and applications and dozens of their attributes such as their age, download source, digital signature, and prevalence. These attributes are then combined using complex algorithms to determine a reputation. As a file is distributed across the Internet and these attributes change, Quorum updates the reputation of the file. This reputation is especially important when a file is new, likely to be a threat, and traditional defenses are not likely to detect it.

Independent 3rd party test lab, AV-Test.org declared the Norton 2010 beta produced "an excellent result"(3) in their recent testing of traditional detection methods such as heuristics and signatures as well as dynamic detection against tougher zero-day threats, which typically escape detection by traditional methods.

Quotes

"One in five people will become a victim of cyber crime," said Rowan Trollope, senior vice president, Consumer Products and Marketing, Symantec. "We know that hackers don't destroy computers, they destroy lives. The powerful new reputation-based security in Norton 2010 gives people the power to deny digital dangers wherever they are found online."

"The expanding number and sophistication of security threats can no longer be contained through signature files and behavioral heuristics alone," said Jon Oltsik, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Symantec's reputation-based security technology for 2010 represents a new and important safeguard in a multi-layer antivirus defense. I believe it's likely that the internet security industry will be building on technologies like Quorum for the next ten years."