Diet security for light computers

Dave Cole

Software company Symantec this month released the latest version of its flagship consumer PC security product, Norton 360 version 3.0. Dave Cole, Symantec's senior director of consumer products, global, talked to Simon Hendery about trends in the home computing security market.

How is the rapid growth in the sales of netbooks - devices that are smaller than laptops - affecting the security software market?

The market is evolving so quickly and the economic headwinds are so fierce that no one really knows. What it means for us, from the product side, is an acceleration of trends. Light and fast [security software] is pitched perfectly for the netbook market. If your product is heavy, taking up a lot of space and impacting boot time, we think those security products will absolutely not live on a netbook.

All the work we've done on performance we see as critical to the netbook market.

Netbooks are predominantly used for web browsing. What does that mean from a security perspective?

We know that the bulk of your time on a netbook is going to be spent on the web so for us all the things we've added to protect people while they're browsing and to make their online life easier are really important. That includes online backup - some netbooks will only have 4 gigabytes of storage.

Many PC users are reluctant to spend money on security. With the global recession and Norton 360's price tag ($129.95), is it going to be even harder to sell this new version?

We see it a bit differently. Everyone is facing the pressure of people being less eager to part with money, but the way we see it is you're going to want to hold on to your PC for as long as possible and a lot of people are holding on to older devices, trying to squeeze as much out of them as they can.

One of the main reasons people get rid of their PC is because of [poor] performance. Our ability to give people back performance by moving to a new version of the software is really important. With version 3 we've added in a utility - a start-up manager - which, for the average machine, will have a marked impact on how quickly it runs.

How are security threats changing?

As the economy worsens the attacks are only getting more aggressive. We're seeing a threat landscape today which is a little different from previous years. There's a shift towards regional and niche-type attacks - ones that are specific to a language and ones that are focused on deception.

Many of them take advantage of the use of multimedia online. Whereas before a lot of the attacks focused solely on breaking into your PC through vulnerabilities, which is still very popular. We're seeing a big push towards deception and tricking people.

Some of these get on to your machine and then try to steal your banking credentials. Others get on your machine and pretend to be legitimate security products, and try to get you to pay to protect your system against phantom issues.

We think this trend to deception is only going to increase as technologies get harder to break into and as the attackers get more savvy about not just hacking into computers but hacking people's wallet and tricking them into doing things.