The changing face of computer security

In the past three years, the two largest antivirus companies, Symantec and McAfee, have completely revised their position on what products they will sell to corporate and home-computing customers. Remember Symantec’s Norton Anti-Virus and McAfee’s VirusScan? They’re still around, but now virus protection is just one component of a secure computing environment. McAfee was first to move away from focusing just on virus-protection to embrace a much larger field. Today, the company's bestseller is called the McAfee Internet Security Suite. It offers eight forms of protection in a single package, including protection against viruses and spyware, a firewall, spam filtering and guards against phishing and identity theft, privacy protection and parental controls. To round out the package, McAfee also throws in a back-up and restore utility and an application that monitors your PC’s health. Likewise in Symantec’s portfolio, Norton Antivirus is practically gone as a standalone product. Instead, Symantec is offering Norton 360, an all-in-one security package that includes: virus scanning, spyware protection, email scanning, online identity protection, website authentication, firewall protection as well as automatic backup and restore and PC tune up utilities. Last year, John W. Thompson, chairman and CEO of Symantec Corporation, said viruses were no longer the major problem: “We have to protect all we do online, as 81 percent of the attacks are aimed at stealing personal information.” A recent Symantec Internet Security Threat report indicates that of the top ten new malicious code families detected in the last six months of 2006, five were Trojans, four were worms and one was a virus. The task facing Symantec and McAfee and all other former antivirus companies has therefore become more complex. Dealing with viruses was one thing, dealing with trojans, worms and bots is another. To increase its protective net, McAfee has introduced SystemGuards that “watch your computer for activity that may signal active virus, spyware or hacker presence.” Its Total Protection product also offers “always-on detection that watches key system, Windows, host file and browser settings for malicious changes such as DNS poisoning-Pharming (which can redirect surfing to fraudulent websites) or activity that can compromise anti-virus security (e.g., buffer overflow attacks).” Symantec is taking steps to counteract what it sees as upcoming new threats to security. The corporation expects to see more threats begin to appear on Windows Vista, with a focus on vulnerabilities and malicious code, and also expects that attackers will focus on third-party applications that run on Vista. Symantec is also preparing for the development of new phishing economies. Symantec reports on Internet risks regularly, and has observed a change in Internet attack activity away from status-oriented attacks and towards criminal activities motivated by profit. The company states in a recent report: “The current threat environment is characterized by an increase in data theft, data leakage, and the creation of malicious code that targets specific organizations for information that can be used for financial gain.”