Security Alternatives to Norton

Internet security month continues here at Zatz Not Funny. Personally and professionally I’ve had a hand in this arena to varying degrees over the years. As our origin story remains untold, you didn’t know that we launched “Project Safety Net” before ZNF morphed into a digital media blog – and the site was intended to provide security guidance for lay people. Like my mom.

As Norton periodically blocks our site from visitors, I’d like take this opportunity to provide some alternate solutions that might serve you better.

The false positives seem to have started about 15 months ago, when various Norton products or components would throw up an interstitial web page strongly encouraging visitors to steer clear of ZNF. One regular reader kindly alerts me when this happens, as he did yesterday, and has previously provided screenshots (above) that’s allowed me to file reports with Norton. Additionally, Norton’s incorrect flagging led to a rather entertaining exchange on the Roku Forums a few months back. From “Village Idiot” :

I have good reasons to trust Norton. – i have no reason to trust you. I DON’T trust some site i never heard of before. It would be really stupid to throw away a trusted Norton program for an unheard of site. Good luck on your site. I just don’t need the risk.

While I know our site’s safe, and based on the back and forth (including further evidence and endorsements) this person appears somewhat paranoid, one can assume his is not an atypical reaction. Which means Norton has failed us both.

First off, all modern web browsers have free, integrated services that alert folks to sites suspected of phishing or hosting malware – comparable to the service Norton seems to have some difficulty managing. So, make sure your browser is current and review each provider’s details here:

Additionally, if you’re sold on Norton, they also offer a free web tool that allows you to validate the efficacy of their paid desktop software. Unfortunately, Norton’s analyses aren’t always in sync as at every check we come up clean (as expected). Google also has a web widget that scans sites for danger. Check it out here and replace our URL in the address bar with any of your choosing. Of course, none of these solutions is perfect; there’s bound to be false positives and yet-to-be indexed threats. Which is why the best defense against web threats remain common sense and solid anti-virus protection.

On the common sense front, don’t download software or make purchases from unknown sites. Especially via links embedded into unsolicited email. And make sure your OS is patched. Simple as that. On the AV front, for probably the last 18 months I exclusively recommend (and use) Microsoft’s Security Essentials. It’s top notch with a minimal footprint. And free. For an additional layer of defense, check out WinPatrol. It runs in conjunction with your other products and the one-time $30 software fee gets you a lifetime of updates. WinPatrol monitors system state and comes very highly recommended… yet Norton and Symantec periodically classify it as a virus. Notice the trend?

15 thoughts on “Security Alternatives to Norton”

  1. Maybe some of those flash ads you display are the culprit? Since they’re supposed to be random, running a URL through an offline scanner wouldn’t always flag the site as bad.

    Google Chrome occasionally blocks me from accessing otherwise benign sites. Luckily, Chrome’s warning is more specific about exactly WHY the site is blocked. THe offender is always an URL related to banner ads.

  2. Interestingly enough I have NIS 2011 installed and had no problems reading your article the other day. Norton didn’t block it at all.

    I have seen Norton block sites that are used by a variety of people though. For example Norton started blocking dropbox.com because it said the site hosted viruses. I don’t doubt some idiot stored a virus on his dropbox account, but it made no sense to block the entire site. Fortunately a quick post on the community.norton.com forums fixed that.

    I still see the occasional block for certain links on deviantart.com, but in the whole Norton works well enough. If I was really bothered by these, I could simply disable the “safeweb” feature.

    Note a lot of people use Norton 360 since Comcast gives it away for free. Personally I use Norton Internet Security because of it’s excellent rating and minimal memory footprint.

  3. PharmNerd, I usually see pretty accurate results from Google. Two of my blogger friends were blocked and had a hard time figuring out what was going on since they weren’t intentionally hosting anything offensive… and they actually run no advertising at all. However, their blogs were hacked and the offenders ran essentially invisible links that humans will only see by viewing the source of a rendered page. These links are designed to game Google rankings.

    In our 6-7 years, I’ve been hacked twice as well – due to vulnerabilities introduced by our hosting provider. Which kinda sucks, and ironically I had no reports from Norton at those times, but I’m more vigilant these days. It’ll probably happen again… this is the cost of doing business on the web.

    Morac, I know Norton made a concerted effort in the last few years to streamline and reduce their resource utilization. Generally speaking, they’re a solid option in this space. However, I obviously take issue when they flag us. ;)

  4. Dave,
    Glad to see you mention WinPatrol. It’s been one of my favorite tools for years. My wife doesn’t always understand the messages when they pop up but she knows enough to ask me about them rather than ignoring them.

  5. Oh, c’mon. No one is going to bother deploying the “well, as a security alternative to Norton, you could just get a Mac” line?

    What is wrong with blog comment threads these days?

  6. Chucky, well that’s how I “fixed” my mom’s ongoing computer problems. ;)

    Unfortunately, the mother-in-law is still 100% Windows and she got herself hijacked real good a couple weeks back. I couldn’t get McAfee Stinger to run as non-installed executable and one of my go-to cleanup tools. Fortunately, I found a YouTube video of all things which ran through the process of eradicating the extortion (buy our fake security product, access your programs once again) and then attempted to harden her computer. But she’s got to stop clicking on random links from random emails.

    Incidentally, about 4 years ago I started prepping a blog called “Mac Insecurity” to cover the growing threats to OS X. But I never found the time to get it going. I checked my abandoned URL today and discovered someone is carrying my torch but is going with “Mac In Security”. Heh.

  7. I just uninstalled Norton today and replaced it with AVG 2011. I’m tired of the false positives, and it really slowed down every aspect of my system. So far so good with AVG, but I haven’t had a lot of time yet to see if my system will be brought down to the same crawl as norton.

  8. AVG is fine, but might I suggest MS’s own solution: Microsoft Security Essentials. It works just as well, is not loaded up with bloatware. A lot of people don’t even know it exists.

  9. Well Dave, it might be bacause of your constant “giveaways”… Norton doesn’t like people giving away cool stuff for FREE!

  10. I have to vote for “Microsoft’s Security Essentials” also if you are going to do the free route.

    I have come to loathe Symantec/Norton and all of their funny business.

  11. I run Norton Internet Security myself. I do seem to get a certain number of false positives, but after a recent zombie attack I’m willing to live with them. I just access those sites inside a VM now.

    On lots of machines I use though I now just install Microsoft Security Essentials. Like others I think its adequate for most purposes. And quiet, light, and of course free.

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