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Norton AntiBot
The internet is plagued with a variety of
nefarious programs that not only attempt to destroy your data, steal
your personal information or monitor the websites that you visit, it’s
becoming a far more dangerous place to be than it was ever intended to
be. The latest threat to users are “botnets” that according to
searchsecurity.com “is a number of Internet computers that, although
their owners are unaware of it, have been set up to forward
transmissions (including spam or viruses) to other computers on the
Internet.”
The FBI have publicly stated that botnets are a threat to national
security and Symantec have reported that during the first six months of
2006, there were over 4 million infected computers that is now believed
to be numbered in excess of 12 million computers. The dangers of these
“bots” is that they not only cripple the users anti-virus and internet
security protocols but they slowly corrupt and take over the users
system with the majority of users being totally unaware of this silent
predator.
Fortunately Antivirus and Internet Security companies have detected this
threat and have created a variety of anti bot programs with Symantec
adding their expertise to the matter in releasing Norton AntiBot that is available as a download on their official website. The
program itself costs $39.95AUD, however can also be downloaded as a
15-day trial program which can then be upgraded to the full version. If
registered, the program gives the user 365 days of support and upgrades
which is a small price to pay for something that could potentially be
extremely deadly.
The installation of Norton AntiBot was a breeze and once the download
was completed, the program installed automatically and required minimal
user input. Once installed, Norton AntiBot silently
watches your system in your system tray while monitoring your system for
any strange system behaviours or file violations.
Norton AntiBot will
also scan your system for existing bots and fortunately our system was
safe. Needless to say, a little bit of internet caution is needed to
keep your system safe and when you’re running Norton 360, most threats
are prevented from entering your system, however bots are a slightly
different danger and users should run up to date firewall/ anti virus
programs with an anti bot program to ensure you are hopefully thoroughly protected.
The program itself only uses around 10meg of system memory which will
ensure minimal system interference, although the standard for computers
should be around 1GB. For those inexperienced users, Norton AntiBot has
the ability to remove all questions and doubt from the user which
performed quite well with almost no prompting. However for more advanced
users, the program also offers more in-depth reporting and allows the
user to view processes, stop a process and even quarantine a process if
they believe the process is suspect.
Norton AntiBot uses heuristic
scanning to monitor the system for bots which means it only stops a
program once it tries to do something malicious which means the threat
can lie dormant on your system until activated. This system is also great for unknown
threats as the Norton AntiBot will automatically detect the threat.
In conclusion, Norton AntiBot is a must have program that is not only
simple to use but also monitors for the latest internet threat.
Definitely recommended to most broadband users or business who are
generally always connected to the internet. Recommended!
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