Review: Symantec Norton Antibot security software

Despite Symantec having a supposedly all-encompassing security suite in the form of Norton 360, the same company has now released an additional tool called Antibot.

Marketed as an extra layer of protection against emerging threats, such as those from web robots (bots), it’s designed to run alongside your other security applications.

Unlike Norton’s traditional anti-virus products, Antibot uses heuristic scanning and constantly monitors for suspicious behaviour instead of reacting to known threats by regularly downloading signatures. The advantage of this method is that it helps prevent zero-day attacks – that is, attacks that infect your computer before a patch is released.

This means dormant threats can lie undetected on your hard drive, but if such a threat leaps into life Antibot should detect it immediately. The interface is simple, with just three tabs: Status, Advanced and Settings. Upon installation, the Status window informed us that 72 processes and 280 behaviours were being monitored – none of which posed a threat.

The Advanced tab provides you with details of suspicious processes on your PC and the threat level they pose. Each process is hyperlinked, and we had hoped this would link to a site detailing exactly what that process is. Instead, the process name is simply entered into Symantec’s internal site search engine, usually with fairly irrelevant and unhelpful results.

Running Antibot didn’t result in any noticeable system slowdown and, since it doesn’t perform systems scans, it won’t slow your computer to a crawl.

Priced at £19.99 for a one-year subscription, Norton Antibot will double the cost of most people’s internet security spending and we suspect that the majority of users will be happy using one of the free services available, such as Spyware Terminator 2 reviewed above.