I should have known, given the whole virus thing is big business, that if one company announces a new product, its rival down the street isn’t likely to stay silent. Hot on the heels (or maybe before, who knows) of McAfee’s upgrade to its VirusScan, Symantec Corp.announced Norton AntiVirus 2004, although tellingly it’s not ‘widely available’ until early September. (Not trying to muddy McAfee’s launch, are we lads?)
Norton AntiVirus 2004 takes a slightly different approach to the growing threat of worms, rather than viruses (worms jump aboard without the user doing anything like loading a file, while viruses depend on the user actually doing something). Norton AntiVirus 2004 will include scans for programs on the user’s computer that can be used with malicious intent to compromise the security of a system, spy on the user’s private data, or track users’ online behavior. AntiVirus will identify and block these threats at the point of entry to the system, detecting the threats during scans of email and instant message attachments, or during scheduled or on-demand system scans. This seems a little different to McAfee, although on the surface this all doesn’t sound that new. I’ll take a closer look and get back to you.
Norton AntiVirus 2004 and Norton AntiVirus 2004 Professional will be available for an estimated retail price of US$49.95 and US$69.95