Norton Internet Security 2003 Review

I Hear You Knocking But You Can't Come In

NIS alerts you when your PC has joined a new network (such as an 802.11b wireless LAN) and has a wizard for setting up protection for a home network, creating a "Trusted Zone" of computers allowed to communicate with your own. But the main job of Norton Personal Firewall is to let you connect safely to the biggest network of them all, the Internet, without throwing open the doors of your PC to every hacker and passerby.

The program passed Gibson Research Corp.'s Shields Up probe with flying colors, making our PC's NetBIOS, POP3, FTP, and other ports (including the recently ballyhooed Universal Plug 'n' Play port 5000) not only impenetrable but invisible to random-chance snoopers. But wait, you say; didn't worms like Nimda and Code Red make it through many firewalls? Sadly, yes -- so Norton's new Intrusion Detection feature checks all incoming and outgoing packets for signatures of known attacks or exploits such as WinNuke and Wrap_CGI (LiveUpdate refreshes these signatures along with virus definitions and other info).

Norton Personal Firewall also makes things easy for consumers when it comes to the classic firewall chore of stopping Trojan horses or spyware while permitting Internet access by "trusted" programs; an initial scan recognizes scores of Internet-enabled applications, while helpful pop-up dialogs explain the risk potential of different access attempts (from first-time, don't-interrupt-again launches of your Web browser or e-mail client to unexpected, unauthorized outbound attempts). The alert dialogs, including an enjoyable option to zero in on a snoop's IP info and location map, strike a good balance of reassurance and detail.

While it works fine, Norton Personal Firewall didn't strike us as being quite as elegant in the program-control area as Zone Labs' ZoneAlarm family -- our Program Scan list was cluttered with confusing triplicate and quadruplicate entries for Windows components, and burrowing into the Options menus to activate checking of individual DLLs and parts of programs brings a baffling barrage of alerts (although we don't think most users will need to try it, any more than they'll use the menu to permit inbound ICMP but not outbound DNS).

A Small Step Toward Less Spam

Similarly, the default settings for Norton's Web-page banner and pop-up/under ad blocker let through a few ads that Panicware's Pop-Up Stopper spared us, but make an unquestionably welcome difference (especially for slower dial-up modem users) when it comes to loading pages' steak without their sizzle. The Options tab lets you configure the program to block not only pop-up ads but cookies and ActiveX or Java applets on a broad or site-specific basis.

Norton Privacy Control lets you enter a list of don't-tell-anyone information, such as phone or credit-card numbers, to be intercepted instead of sent via a Web form, e-mail, or instant message. Norton Parental Control lives up to its name by blocking access to objectionable Web sites -- and, new in this version, newsgroups -- based on a Symantec-supplied, regularly updated directory or personal blacklist.

Finally, though it's a very limited, simple first strike against the surging armies of commercial e-mailers, a Spam Alert feature compares incoming e-mails against lists of senders and subject phrases and automatically adds "Spam Alert:" to the start of unsolicited items' subject lines (changing, say, "Cheap Printer Cartridges!" to "Spam Alert: Cheap Printer Cartridges!"). The manual and help screens tell you how to add a filter to your e-mail program that'll bounce these messages from your inbox to a new folder, where you can review and delete them at your leisure.

Spam Alert is liable to tag at least a few "real" or wanted e-mails as spam, and in our few days' testing it let maybe a third of the junk mail slide by -- but hey, when it comes to a painless way to reduce spam, batting .600 is not bad, and you can improve its average by custom-tuning your own filters. The spam tally, like intrusion and virus histories, can be reviewed, saved, or cleared from NIS' log files.

Overall, Norton Internet Security 2003 succeeds superbly at its mission -- to offer a friendly, all-in-one, peace-of-mind package for everyday Web and e-mail users. Yes, it could be even nicer with a few more features added; yes, tech-savvy users can roll up their sleeves and configure even stronger protection via a combination of other programs. But for $70 a year ($40 if you're an upgrader), Symantec's insurance policy is hard to resist.