Norton Internet Security 2003

This is the latest version containing Norton Anti-virus 2003, Personal Firewall, and other features for personal workstations.

We reviewed the Anti-Virus part last month, and had found the extra feature of being able to scan Instant Messengers for viruses. The new features in this release include password protection and spam blocking. Other useful features that were there in the previous version are parental control and ad blocking. 

The product is easy to use with a security assistance wizard guiding you through the firewall’s configuration. The security assistance has five categories, namely home networking, program scan, privacy control, password protection and parental control. Home networking allows you to grant/deny others access to your computer. The program scan component scans for Internet-enabled programs like mail-clients and Web browsers on your computer and creates access rules for them. These can also be customized later as needed. Privacy control protects your personal information like credit card numbers and instant messenger passwords from leaking out. Password protection is a new feature that prevents anybody from tampering with the firewall and security settings you made in the Internet Security Suite. This feature comes in handy if you share your desktop with others. Parental control is useful for home users as it allows you to restrict children from viewing adult content on the web. You can create user accounts with different levels of security, which includes child, adult and teenage. The accounts can be created through your OS, or through the security suite itself. The software has a default list of websites that are blocked depending upon the security level. You can also customize this list by adding or deleting sites. 

Other features include an intrusion detection system that automatically detects and blocks any Internet attacks on your computer. It has a very good spam-blocking feature, wherein it automatically identifies spam mails from its own database and appends “Spam Alert” in their subject line. You then simply need to create a message rule from your mail client, which will filter out all messages containing the “Spam Alert” text string. 

It has an easy to navigate interface, and its system monitor shows all incoming and outgoing traffic on your computer. We tested its firewall capabilities by doing a network scan on it using a Retina network scanner. By default, the firewall blocks all outgoing ICMP messages, meaning you’ll not get any response if you ping it. So naturally, Retina was not able to find the machine. We then enabled ICMP, and still Retina was only able to detect the machine name and IP address. The firewall didn’t let Retina identify any system vulnerabilities. 

The Bottom Line The product has useful features, but at Rs 4,522, it may not appeal to everyone. 

Sanjay Majumder