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Symantec Corp. last week announced that the next version of Norton AntiVirus will include technology to protect against rogue applications such as keystroke loggers and spyware.
Even as viruses such as SoBig and others rampage across the Internet and infect machines almost at will, emerging threats, including spyware, Trojans and others, are becoming more prevalent and harder to detect and remove. NAV 2004 will be capable of blocking these applications if theyre embedded in e-mail or instant messages and will have the ability to find them during system scans.
Spyware and Trojans are often found in freeware and shareware programs downloaded from the Internet and are also common in peer-to-peer clients distributed for free by file- sharing networks. Malicious software also tends to show up in the files traded on such networks. To help prevent these threats from getting onto users machines, NAV 2004 can scan compressed files in real time as theyre downloaded. This feature is available only to Windows 2000 and Windows XP users.
All these features will be included in the consumer and professional editions of NAV, but the professional edition will also include a data recovery feature and something Symantec calls “digital shredding,” which renders deleted files completely irretrievable.
NAV 2004 will ship early this month, and the professional version will start at $69.95.
Also last week, Symantec, of Cupertino, Calif., unveiled its AntiVirus for Handhelds product line.
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