Pricing for Norton AntiVirus and Norton Internet Security will not change from the 2006 editions, but the company will let NIS 2007 be installed on three computers, instead of one, for the same price. This mimics Microsoft’s OneCare license strategy, if not its pricing.
NAV 2007 will sell for $39.99, the same annual fee charged for NAV 2006. NIS 2007 will sell for $69.99, with an upgrade from the older version costing $49.99. These prices are unchanged from last year’s prices, according to executives. Both products are expected to be available online later this month.
For comparison, Microsoft’s unfortunately named OneCare is selling for $49.95 for a three-PC annual license. Previously, NIS 2006 would cost $119.95 when you wanted a three-seat annual license.
Norton Internet Security users tend to have more users at home than traditional Norton AntiVirus users, said Symantec product manager Michelle Chang, when asked the reason for the change.
While the company is following Microsoft’s lead in reducing the multi-seat license fee, it is standing firm on its base retail prices, which are still $20 more expensive than Microsoft’s. And buyers will not get the PC maintenance and data backup features Microsoft is offering with OneCare.
For those, consumers will have to buy Norton 360, formerly code-named Genesis, which contains all the features of NIS 2007 as well as Norton Save & Restore and Norton SystemWorks for backup and PC performance tuning.
Given NIS is a functional subset of Norton 360, we could expect 360 to retail for more than NIS 2007, but Symantec executives would not confirm this.
However, NIS and 360 will this year also include with the features of Norton Confidential, a new product designed to combat phishing and a certain subset of malware that Symantec calls crimeware. Confidential, due for release next month, will also sell separately for $49.99.
According to Oliver Schmelzle, the group product manager at Symantec who came on board when the company bought WholeSecurity last year, Confidential can use a combination of blacklists and heuristics to detect known and unknown phishing web sites, alerting the user before they hand over sensitive data.
It comes in the form of another browser toolbar. As well as parsing pages to see if they look like frauds, the software also contains fingerprints of the SSL certificates of several hundred known legitimate web sites, so users can be alerted when they are definitely looking at the page they want to.
NIS and NAV have also been souped up since their 2006 edition releases. According to Chang, one of the key changes is better performance, with a 33 second average boot time and 10-15MB memory consumption, which Symantec says is five times better than the company.
There’s also new pre-installation scanning, she said, to help the software install on machines that are already infected with viruses. The user interface has also been simplified, she said, although options for advanced users are still available.
As far as the protection capabilities go, there’s at least one important upgrade for dealing with unknown threats, so-called zero-day attacks, an increasingly important area security firms are addressing.
While NAV is still signature-based, the way the signatures are handled has been changed to cast a wider net. A signature will also be able to catch variants, based on their similarities, Chang said.
It checks for specific patterns and characteristics, the specific shape of the infection vector, she said. It’s still signature-based technology, but one signature could potentially protect against a broader range of threats.
There’s also some extra rootkit detection technology included. Surprisingly, this is as a result of Symantec’s Veritas acquisition. That deal brought on board VxMS, Veritas technology for looking at files at the volume level, a little deeper than previous versions of NIS permitted.
