Norton AntiBot

Just when you think you know everything about the online threats your computer faces, along comes something new you need protection against. Many anti-malware vendors agree there’s a new strain of menace that standard anti-virus and firewall software won’t protect you against – bots – and Symantec has released a new tool to tackle the problem – Norton AntiBot.

Bots are a type of malicious program that, should one find its way on to your computer, could allow someone to access it remotely. This might be to try and steal personal information from you, or it might be turning your PC into a ‘zombie’ computer, using its processing power and internet bandwidth. When ranked alongside other zombie PCs in a ‘botnet’, the person controlling the group of infected PCs could use them to perform large-scale computing tasks like sending out millions of spam emails.

AntiBot’s aim is to run all the time, in the background, observing the behavioural patterns of your PC’s programs to try and ensure there’s nothing untoward going on.

Performance
The obvious question to ask is “doesn’t my existing security set-up already do this?” It might, but it depends on what you’ve got. Symantec’s Internet Security and 360 suites, for example, rely far more heavily on blocking and scanning, which use known virus behaviours, or ‘signatures’, to stop malicious software Symantec already knows about and that’s already installed on your PC. By always being on and analysing behavioural patterns on the fly, AntiBot will do a better job of stopping new problems. However, if you’re already running software that works in this way – and many anti-spyware products do – this is less of an issue.

Ease of use
Using the software is easy – you can just install it and forget about it. If you don’t get targeted by a bot attack, you probably won’t notice anything about the program apart from its Sytem Tray icon – it’s about as unobtrusive as you could ask for. If it does find anything suspicious it will quarantine
it immediately.

Value for money
Value for money is, in our minds, the big question that hangs over this software, mostly because its functionality isn’t covered by any of Symantec’s other existing security suites. If we’d just bought a copy of Norton Internet Security or Norton 360, we’d be a bit miffed now Symantec has suggested we need to fork out another £20 to be totally safe on the web. To make matters worse, AntiBot won’t even appear in the Symantec’s imminently arriving Internet Security 2008. And frankly, it seems a bit of a swizz to offer a security suite that needs add-ons to operate properly.