Upcoming Norton edition tweaks its name and proposes a new and improved interface

Jul 11, 2014 16:01 GMT  ·  By

Developer Symantec, best known for its premium antivirus products, has released a beta version yesterday for the highly-anticipated Norton Security 2015 and Norton Security 2015 with Backup. Users and testers are welcome to try out the new product before its official release and report any bugs, issues, or suggestions. The trial period lasts 7 days.

Before getting into the whole installation, however, we can notice that Symantec made some tweaks to the product names. Norton Internet Security has become Norton Security, while Norton 360 has turned into Norton Security with Backup. As for the setup pack, everything is pretty much still the same. Installation is carried out fast and users are not given the possibility to exclude components from the package.

New and improved interface

Just one look at screenshots is enough to notice that the interface has been significantly modified. It seems that Norton has dropped the dark theme and inverted the color, adopting a predominantly white appearance with green elements, giving the antivirus tool a cleaner look overall.

Norton's first reaction when starting it up is to run a quick scan to assess the current PC security status, but not before fetching the latest virus definitions from its online database.

Four large flat buttons in the main menu direct users to the Security, Identity, and Performance components, along with additional Norton utilities available online (these buttons should be particularly useful to tablet owners). The panel above them shows information related to each of these components.

Showing the interface in Norton Security 2015 Beta
Showing the Security panel in Norton Security 2015 Beta
The new interface is cleaner than the 2014 versionWhen it comes to security, users may view the current security status, last scan time, and updates date, as well as expand this panel to reveal more buttons to run scans, download updates, access history, and turn off each module.
Showing the Identity panel in Norton Security 2015 Beta
Showing the Performance panel in Norton Security 2015 Beta
Easily access the security modules dedicated to Identity and Performance"Identity" gives access to the identity safe, ID settings, Safe Search, and password generator, while "Performance" lets users optimize the disk, clean up files, manage autostart entries, and examine events in graphs.

Security Component

The security area has all options neatly organized in a list with brief descriptions for their purpose. Quick, full system, and custom scans can be run to examine either key areas of the computer, everything, or just specific files, folders, and drives. An additional scanning mode called "Custom Tasks" lets users pick jobs when it comes to updates, PC cleanup (Internet Explorer temporary files and history, Windows temporary files), and disk optimization.

Showing the Scans area in Norton Security 2015 Beta
Showing the Custom Tasks panel in Norton Security 2015 Beta
Run scans and customize various tasksNorton Power Eraser is an emergency tool that attempts to repair the computer when it's dealing with hard-to-remove malware agents undetected by normal scans, including rootkits. It's considered a severe measure due to its aggressiveness, but the program gives users the possibility of undoing actions afterward.

Norton Insight monitors active processes and startup items to find out which of them are trusted by the user community, have the highest impact on performance, and so on. In addition, the application is capable of scanning the Facebook Wall to verify links exchanged between friends in messages, the Newsfeed, and other areas.

Showing the Norton Insight configuration area in Norton Security 2015 Beta
Showing the Diagnostic Report area in Norton Security 2015 Beta
Monitor active processes with Norton Insight and examine diagnostic reportsDiagnostic reports gather computer information to help users identify and fix various issues. They focus on the operating system, resource utilization, startup and installed programs, the hardware profile, inoperable hardware devices, network connectivity issues, system restore points, and active processes. They can be saved, emailed, and printed.

Security history records alerts, events, scan results, and items submitted to Symantec for analysis. Users may also manage quarantine objects and keep an eye on jobs that run in the background. This information can be exported to file and reviewed at a later time.

Showing the History area in Norton Security 2015 Beta
Showing the Advanced settings in Norton Security 2015 Beta
Look into past activity and configure advanced settingsThe "Advanced" area enables users to deactivate various modules with one click – antivirus, anti-spyware, SONAR Protection (detects yet unknown security threats based on app behavior), Smart Firewall (prevents unauthorized connections to the PC), intrusion prevention (anti-hacker), email and browser protection, identity safe, safe surfing, and Download Intelligence.

Identity component

Norton protects the user's identity by ensuring secure online navigation via SafeSearch, protection against phishing websites, and a vault to keep all confidential information in one place, such as login credentials and transaction data. The password generator is an online service that generates random and secure keys based on user-defined rules.

Showing the Safe Search feature in Norton Security 2015 Beta
Showing the Identity settings in Norton Security 2015 Beta
Securely navigate the Internet and configure Identity settings As far as identity settings are concerned, it is possible to disable the anti-phishing and Norton Safe Web modules, allow malicious online pages, show site rating icons in search results, and turn off an Insight information tool for scams. These properties can be restored to default.

Performance component

Norton Security integrates a few utilities to ensure all-round computer performance. The disk optimizer and file cleaner run with default parameters that cannot be altered, in order to defrag the disk and free up space, as well as to delete leftover files belonging to web browsers and various programs, respectively.

Showing the Startup Manager in Norton Security 2015 Beta
Showing the Events Graph in Norton Security 2015 Beta
Manage autostart entries and explore past events in graphsThe startup manager lets users deactivate apps that automatically run at system startup to boost Windows boot time, based on their resource usage recorded by Norton's community. Alternatively, they can be delayed. Meanwhile, the event graphs collect monthly information on installations, downloads, optimization jobs, detections, quick scans, and alerts, giving users the possibility of optimizing PC performance.

Extensive set of options

The application comes packed with numerous options that can be customized when it comes to the antivirus, firewall, antispam, identity protection, task scheduling, and administrative settings, along with quick controls to enable or turn off silent mode (no notifications), safe surfing, identity safe, automatic updates, intelligent firewall, and Norton Tamper Protection (a self-defense measure to prevent apps from modifying Norton's settings and disarm the computer).

Showing the settings in Norton Security 2015 Beta
Showing the antivirus settings in Norton Security 2015 Beta
Configure all settings in detailThe boot time protection level is adjustable, depending on the severity level preferred. Meanwhile, the real-time guard can be configured by disabling any of its features: automatic protection, removable media scanning, SONAR, network drive protection, and so on.

Advanced users may tinker with scan options concerning compressed files, automatic removal, rootkits and stealth items, network drives, heuristics, tracking cookies, protected ports, emails, together with exclusions and low-risk elements. The anti-spyware module can be separately disabled and all settings may be restored to default.

The firewall component has plenty of configurable options of its own, and they can be best understood by experienced users (although Norton features a thorough help manual online specially designed for the beta version). They revolve around uncommon protocols, traffic blocking exceptions, network and device trust, program control, traffic rules, intrusion prevention, and much more.

Showing the firewall settings in Norton Security 2015 Beta
Showing the antispam settings in Norton Security 2015 Beta
Configure firewall and anti-spam settingsSome filters can be defined for the anti-spam measure when it comes to address book exclusions, allowed and blocked lists, web query and protected protocols, along with client integration (support for Microsoft Outlook). Scan jobs can be scheduled, while Norton Security background tasks can be disabled.

Performance results

The moment of truth: Norton Security 2015 Beta is clearly cleaner, friendlier, and more attractive than before, putting special emphasis on adapting its features to novice users' requirements. Well, that's not really possible since the application comes bundled with numerous settings for advanced usage.

However, the part that interests us the most is performance, namely scan speed, real-time responsiveness, malware detection ratio, and impact on resource usage.

We submitted a collection of 8,502 virus samples worth 2.36GB, which did not include zero-day (dangerous) threats. The testing machine was an Intel Core i5-3470 with CPU @3.20GHz and 12GB RAM, running Windows 8.1 Pro. Default settings were applied.

The real-time guard was on alert, detecting the infected files as soon as they were extracted from the password-protected archive. It took it a while to remove all of them, but marked only 332 files as malware, leaving behind 8,170 items.

After this step, we ran a contextual scan with default settings on the remaining files. After a painfully long amount of time (almost 3 hours), Norton finally finished the scan-and-remove job. It removed 4,956 additional files and left behind 3,214 items. We ran an extra scan job to be safe and the tool managed to eliminate another 1,524 files, leaving behind Overall, its success ratio was roughly 82%.  We expected better results.

A 44.5GB directory with 271,090 items was scanned in 10 minutes and 42 seconds. CPU and RAM consumption was low during this time.

The biggest bugs we found were when attempting to run Norton Security on Windows 8.1 Pro. It failed to obtain the necessary updates at startup. Plus, after a reinstallation, we noticed that time passed very quickly in Symantec's universe, because the trial period was marked as expired (instead of the seven-day period).

Conclusion

Thankfully, this is only the beta version, so bugs and various issues are to be expected, as they will most likely get fixed before the program's official release. In the meantime, Norton Security 2015 has to work on its malware detection ratio and removal speed, because we were not impressed with this beta. On the other hand, it has never looked better.

Users can download Norton Security 2015 and Norton Security 2015 with Backup for themselves to run tests as long as they keep in mind that the beta version is unstable.