Norton AntiBot

~ the last words ~

Norton AntiBot asked you to buy a second security product to run alongside the first one. In Turkey in 2007 that was a difficult sentence to finish. The machines I was around ran whatever antivirus came free or whatever had been cracked, and the notion of a paid supplement to a paid suite belonged to a retail market I was not in.

The product itself was narrower than its name suggested. Symantec released a beta on 7 June 2007 and put it on sale on 17 July, built on behavior detection licensed from a California company called Sana Security. Instead of matching files against signatures, it watched running programs for the things malware does, which was meant to close the gap between a new strain appearing and a signature being written for it. Symantec was explicit that it did not replace your antivirus. It also could not see malware that was sitting still, since a dormant program has no behavior to monitor.

The timing was the pitch. Symantec's own numbers had bots rising 29 percent between the first and second halves of 2006, with roughly six million active bots by the end of that year, and the fear being sold was that your computer had already been recruited without you noticing. Symantec's own product page led with the line "Protect your PC from being hijacked", above an Add To Cart button, for Windows XP and Vista.

~ the record ~

~ the engine was rented ~

On 16 January 2009 AVG announced that its acquisition of Sana Security was complete. AVG's chief executive talked about the 40,000 unique malware samples his analysts were seeing every day and the need for protection that did not wait for a signature, which is the same argument Symantec had been making with Sana's code eighteen months earlier.

Symantec confirmed it was ceasing sales and distribution of Norton AntiBot in early 2009. Existing customers kept updates and help for one year following their last purchase or renewal, and after that the product was finished. AVG turned the technology into a standalone product called AVG Identity Protection, which it also discontinued, folding the pieces into AVG Internet Security 2011.

~ the botnet years ~

PC Magazine's testing was decent for a version 1.0. The behavior detection was above average at spotting malicious programs and did not flag legitimate software by mistake. The failures were on the machines that needed it most: on some already-infected systems AntiBot would not install at all, and on others it caused blue screens when it could not fully remove what it had found.

Botnets did not go away in 2009. What went away was the idea that you would buy a separate box for each kind of threat, which is how Norton sold software for a decade. Everything after this was bundled into one suite and sold as a subscription, and the standalone utility with one job quietly stopped being a product category.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »