PCNRTNAV.RVW 950608 Comparison Review Company and product: Symantec/Peter Norton 10201 Torre Avenue Cupertino, CA 95014 USA 408-253-9600 800-441-7234 Customer Service 408-252-3570 Fax: 503-334-7400 416-923-1033 Technical Support: 503-465-8450 BBS: 503-484-6669 Retrieval Fax: 503-984-2490 Norton AntiVirus 3 Summary: Manual and TSR virus scanning, as well as change detection. Cost U$130, U$69/C$79 for annual update service Rating (1-4, 1 = poor, 4 = very good) "Friendliness" Installation 3 Ease of use 2 Help systems 2 Compatibility 3 Company Stability 3 Support 2 Documentation 2 Hardware required 2 Performance 2 Availability 4 Local Support 1 General Description: The NAV.EXE program has the ability to scan memory, boot sectors and files for the presence of known viral programs, and to "inoculate" programs to detect change. It can also recover some damage to programs and boot sectors. Comparison of features and specifications User Friendliness Installation The program is shipped on three 1.44M "read only" disks, therefore cannot be infected at the user's site without active intervention. Network installation assistance is provided in the installation program. Ease of use The program is "menu driven", but use without a mouse is not necessarily intuitive, nor do all menus work consistently. Ten pages of the manual are devoted to the use of the interface. The menus are, however, generally clear and readable. The "Advanced scan" and "Auto-inoculate" features of the system are simply variations on checksumming and change detection, but are set up and explained in a manner which appears to be unnecessarily confusing. The options available in the "Options/Configuration" menu allow for a considerable degree of customization, but reasons for choosing certain options are not clearly explained in the initial installation section of the manual. Some options do not appear to work: I did not chose to "Disable scan Cancel *b*utton" (*b* being the letter used to access this option), but the "cancel scan" option was disabled on my program anyway. If a virus is detected in memory at the beginning of a scan, the program will refuse to scan further. This is an advantage in that it prevents infection by viri which infect each file as it is open, but there is no "discretion" on this feature, and it activates even when boot sector viri are found. The program does not terminate, but will not perform (in terms of scanning). No help is given at this point: the user is referred to a section of the manual. Help systems The program contains an extensive help file. Personally, I did not find the onscreen help to be very useful, generally having to go to the of the manual if I could not figure out the operation from the menus. Compatibility Although not stated in the manual, many functions no longer work for CPUs lower than a 286 level. Company Stability Symantec and Peter Norton have both been solid companies in their respective environments. Symantec has also purchased Zortech, Certus and Fifth Generation, all of which have been marketing antiviral software and recently merged with Central Point, which had been following a similar pattern. Company Support The company appears to have removed both a technical support line and a "Virus Newsline" for update information on new viral signatures. The distribution of updated signature files has been problematic. Initially they were available only from the Symantec BBS or on CompuServe, where Symantec runs a support forum. Offers of space on other systems were turned down. Subsequently, a Symantec representative stated that update files could be distributed via BBSes, at the same time that other agents were saying that this was a violation of copyright. At one point a demo version of the program was stated to be available on "hundreds of bulletin boards worldwide". This was later found to refer to the Symantec BBS and CompuServe only. Most recently permission has been granted to distribute the update files from ftp sites on the Internet. However, no announcements of availability were made and the future of this distribution is completely unknown. It should be noted that although the initial program was promised to the reviewer, that it required eleven return phone calls to five different offices to finally have it delivered over three months later. Other shipping was similar, although most recently the package was the fourth to arrive after a general call for review materials. The series of acquisitions by both Symantec and Central Point means the company has absorbed a significant group of antiviral software vendors. This represents more than a dozen products which have been removed from the market or had support withdrawn. The buyouts appear to have been done soley to gain market share. Less than a month after the company had been purchased, callers were being told that the product support for Fifth Generation products had been discontinued, and were offered "upgrades" to NAV. To date, only one of the technologies of the "orphaned" products has been added to the Norton AntiVirus. Documentation The documentation is much improved from earlier versions, but still refers only to program operation and has little general discussion of viral programs. Hardware Requirements A 286 or above is required for many functions. Performance The TSR scanner is invoked from CONFIG.SYS. While it cannot prevent infection of the system from a "boot sector" infected diskette, it does not detect the presence of such a virus in memory, and it neither prevents infection of diskettes, nor alerts the user to the use of an infected diskette or the operation of infecting. Repair of viral programs appeared to be effective on those few for which this is an option. However, the major option tends to be deletion. Local Support Although local sales offices of Symantec/Peter Norton are widely available, support is only provided through central technical support. Support Requirements In its current form, the product is suitable for novice users, but installation and actions when a virus is found may require more expert support. General Notes Statements from former employees indicate serious problems within the Norton AntiVirus product development group, possibly with regard to management. Normally, this would simply fall within the realm of mere gossip, but the almost complete lack of development of the product over the past year tends to add credence to the rumour. copyright Robert M. Slade 1991, 1993, 1995 PCNRTNAV.RVW 950608 ====================== ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 RSlade@cyberstore.ca Why did the chicken cross the Moebius Strip? To get to the other.. um.. er.. Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" 0-387-94311-0/3-540-94311-0