By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
March 11, 2010

At least 2GB of backup space that users can now access anytime and anywhere has been included in version 4.0 of Norton 360, the company’s all-in-one security and utilities software, a company executive revealed Tuesday.

Included in the offering is Norton Tiki, a free application which iPhone, iPad, and Android phone users can install to access their backed-up data wherever they are.

Norton said security issues are not as prevalent on smartphones compared to PCs, but remarked that “there are still opportunities” in the mobile space for security vendors like them.

The fourth coming of Norton’s all-in-one brand hopes to address the exponential rise of malwares in recent years, which has victimized one in five Internet users worldwide.

In August to October 2009 alone, Norton detected around 17.4 million drive-by downloads of malware across PCs worldwide. That’s about the same amount of threats detected for the entire period of 2008.

“We are trying to combat consumer apathy, when they think that cybercrime won’t happen to them,” said Effendy Ibrahim, business lead, Norton Asia South region. “Yes, it can. And the probability is actually very high.”

Effendy said Norton is coming out of a recent change in malware detection methodology, which uses the reputation approach in order to combat threats. “We are now taking the strength in numbers by using reputation technology and Norton Community Watch in order to detect a large number of unique malware files,” he explained.

Norton Community Watch takes the wisdom of participating Norton users by sending reputation ratings of files on their computers to a central repository. This can then be used by other users to countercheck malicious files on their own machines, reducing the amount of false positives the software returns.

Since its launch last year, at least 177 billion reputation ratings have been sent by Norton users. “That’s about 26 times the world’s current population,” Ibrahim quipped. Norton’s reputation technology has also protected one in two users from malware, he added.

Norton 360 version 4.0 is available in a three-license package for P3,190, while a single-use license can be obtained for P1,995, both with a one-year subscription to the product and other Norton services.

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