Symantec Revamps Corporate Antivirus Tool
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Revamped Endpoint Protection program enters public beta during vendor conference this week.
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(InfoWorld) - Symantec has emerged from its bunker in the British countryside, moving its malware-fighting operations from a former U.K. military nuclear shelter to a more conventional office in Reading. The nuclear bunker, with concrete walls and an obscure entrance on a hillside near Twyford, England, was used for one of the company's Special Operations Center (SOC). The regional centers are used by security analysts who are part of the company's Managed Security Services. Companies hire Symantec to help with part or all of their IT security operations. The nuclear shelter may have been good public relations for a security company, but it wasn't comfortable: It lacked windows and had "sanitation" problems, company officials said. On Wednesday, Symantec offered a tour of its new facility in Reading to journalists, analysts, and customers. The facility, formerly used by storage company Veritas, which Symantec acquired in 2005, has twice as much space as the bunker and was needed to accommodate Symantec's growth. Symantec now has under one roof its consultancy, moved from Maidenhead, England, to the new facility, and its SOC, a move that will help dealing with customers, said Arthur Wong, senior vice president of Symantec Managed Security Services. Symantec only allowed visitors a brief peak at the SOC analysts working on Wednesday through a glass window with parted blinds. Those analysts sift through reports that note suspicious events on different companies' networks. Although much analysis of the log reports is automated, humans are still needed to look at data, said Alan Osborne, senior manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa operations. Symantec's service-level agreements mandate that they notify a client within 10 minutes of a critical problem, Osborne said. About 30 analysts work in the U.K. SOC. Symantec operates four other SOCs in the U.S., Australia, and Japan, which can be called on during emergencies. On Tuesday, a fire alarm went off, and the U.K. SOC's operations were rolled over to a U.S. SOC within minutes, Osborne said. Symantec officials said they are seeing rapid growth in managed security services due in part to companies trying to keep IT costs down while dealing with complex threats and government regulation. The oil company BPÂ started using Symantec's managed services about five years ago when it wanted to separate networks used to control oil production, such as those that turn on and off values, and its corporate network, said Robert W. Martin, DCT Digital Security. Access to one network from the other could be catastrophic, Martin said. BP usually gets between three to 10 security alerts a month from Symantec, which performs such functions as firewall monitoring, Martin said. For example, Symantec notified BP when it detected peer-to-peer traffic on their network, Martin said, which can be a sign of malicious activity. Other companies, such as Imperial Chemical Industries, are looking to managed services to outsource capabilities they don't have in-house. Paul Simmonds, the chemical company's chief information security officer, said they are considering Symantec services since they offer greater depth and research on threats. Now, hackers have typically focused on other industries, but "we know one day someone will work down the food chain and hit on ICI," Simmonds said.
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There&#39;s good news and bad news on the security front. Internet security company Symantec Corp. on Monday released its Internet Security Threat Report, which provides a six-month snapshot
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TechWeb - Symantec announced it is working on a Web-based console for IT administrators to manage Norton AntiVirus for the Macintosh clients -- the software is expected in two months.
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Revamped Norton AntiVirus, Personal Firewall, and AntiSpam tools fight pests and dangers online.
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SonicWall has announced a new version of its e-mail security software that runs on Windows servers or the company's own appliances.
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Release of anti-spyware tool, promise of virus removal software could spell trouble for antivirus software companies.
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Software giant promises to deliver another tool to fight worms and viruses.
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Security software firm McAfee has unveiled a new module for its virus-scan engine that is designed to help businesses fight spyware.
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Symantec unveiled a new version of its NetBackup software that adds management and administration features that appear to fix problems that caused past users to dump the product.
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Antivirus software company McAfee Inc. said on Monday that a new version of its VirusScan Enterprise software contains so-called "intrusion prevention" features that can protect computers from attacks such as buffer overflows, which are often used by viruses, worms and malicious hackers to compromise vulnerable Microsoft Corp. Windows machines.
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Blog: Symantec releases public betas for Norton Antivirus 2008 and Norton Internet Security 2008.
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DECEMBER 24, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Antivirus company Symantec Corp. warned its customers about a number of critical holes in Microsoft Corp.
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Anti-virus protection is so last century Symantec's integration with Veritas in the UK has run into computer problems, leaving many Symantec customers unable to renew their corporate anti-virus licenses and large numbers of computers unprotected.â¦
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According to some industry analysts, as many as 90 percent of all enterprise businesses currently assign oversight of anti-virus technologies to their desktop management teams, rather than ceding the work to security specialists.The reasons behind this fact are simple, market watchers maintain, as the process of keeping AV agents up-to-date, distributing new virus signatures to end points, and monitoring PC configurations for anomalies are exactly the types of tasks that IT operations teams are expected to carry out.If you add in the fact that many companies are looking at their IT security and management functions from the perspective of handling regulatory compliance demands, experts say, it becomes clear how much commonality exists between the security and management camps.As such, it should come as no surprise that a growing number of organizations are beginning to view much of their traditional security work -- in specific chores that don't involve warding off attacks -- from a systems management standpoint.That's the reason why security market leader Symantec plunked down $830 million for management software vendor Altiris in Jan. 2007, and why so many IT management technology providers are dipping their toes in the security waters, said Neil MacDonald, analyst with researcher firm Gartner."In most cases clients are looking to reduce complexity and costs, and improve overall systems manageability; today it's very hard to configure and manage security products made by multiple vendors, so we're seeing this trend toward what you might call Darwinistic operationalization," MacDonald said.Based on the growing management headaches created by the presence of so many security tools in the modern enterprise, businesses are looking for ways to centralize oversight of the various technologies and hand off their control to operational specialists, the analyst said.That is why Symantec and McAfee are pushing expanded management capabilities, and why so many companies with management backgrounds -- such as BigFix, Kace, and LanDesk -- are now actively marketing their security skills, MacDonald said."This is a very important trend, because most security issues actually arise in systems management, and even if you love Symantec and are on a path to acquire their various products, there's a pretty good chance that you'd at least consider the security solutions being offered by these other providers coming from more of an operational side," the analyst said."These companies on the operational side will definitely come head-to-head with the security companies, and really, that's a good thing for everyone," MacDonald said. "Because the endgame is that users should end up with more integrated functionality at a lower price."Of course, major IT systems management platform providers including CA, EMC, IBM, and Microsoft are also competing in the security market, and are doing so with increasing success based on their management skills, the analyst said."If a security person can do a better job by using management applications, and vice versa, then why not; even though these companies look at things through a different lens, there's a great amount of value in eliminating duplication of tasks such as inventory management," MacDonald said. "All the management vendors have a great case to make; convergence may be too strong of a word, but there will certainly be increased integration across security and operations-type applications."Strategy leaders at Symantec agreed that the confluence of security and systems management is seemingly unavoidable, especially as each of the processes becomes so much a part of the other.The shift is the primary reason why the massive AV and systems defense company was compelled to make such a significant investment in management expertise through its buyout of Altiris, executives said."When we looked at this area and how we wanted to approach the market, we saw management as changing the entire game right now because of a number of factors," said Tim Brown, senior director of architecture and strategy for Symantec."The bar for management has risen in the last few years with issues such as virtualization placing a heavier demand for coordination between security and management," Brown said. "We really needed to become a leader in both disciplines and offer a consistent fashion through which customers can manage and remediate their systems in a tightly integrated way."Symantec has been helping companies manage compliance issues for a decade, Brown noted, but alerting customers to problems that auditors might find is no longer enough, he contends, because users are also asking the vendor to provide the mechanisms necessary to remediate any issues it finds.Emerging technologies such as network access control (NAC) that involve everything from testing systems configuration to updating AV tools won't be as broadly adopted by end-users if vendors such as Symantec can't offer the ability to cover both the security and management tasks they require, the executive said.Leaders of systems management companies such as LanDesk echo Symantec's observation that their products are increasingly becoming the tools through which customers handle a great deal of security work."Many of our customers are having a hard time differentiating between systems and security management as so much of what they do to secure the device is around traditional systems management work," said Steve Daly, who took over as general manager at LanDesk at the beginning of 2007."Customers are looking for tools that give them a view into inventory, the known state of their systems, to do the remediation and bring everything into compliance, which is really the traditional realm of systems management," Daly said. "They're talking about moving to service management, but the reality is that they're caught up being reactive in break-fix mode; they want to move into more of an over-arching process focus, and that's driving a philosophical change for IT and how we deliver our products."Those factors are the very reason that a systems management specialists such as LanDesk was pushed to launch its maiden host intrusion protection system (HIPs) earlier this year, Daly said."Our opportunity comes from being able to lock down the device and watch the device and defend it in a preemptive manner, versus after an attack hits the device," Daly said. "I think it will be more of a challenge for the Symantecs of the world to build a single client that covers both security and management, coming from their side of the business."Other management technology vendors said that they have long considered security as one of their core strengths, even if they didn't market their products as such.Marty Kacin, co-founder and chief technology officer at systems management appliance vendor Kace, said that midsize companies have been approaching the issue from a more unified standpoint for years, and that enterprises are merely beginning to follow suit in viewing the issues together.Along with covering issues of inventory and systems image provisioning, Kace's appliances provide features including security patch distribution and desktop vulnerability assessment."We've never differentiated security from management from the get-go, yet we never marketed around security until recently when it became clear that this was a message that resounds with customers," Kacin said. "And really when you think about it, it's not just that patching and configuration management relate to security, the issue is that the processes of systems management and security are fundamentally interdependent."Companies such as BigFix, which has marketed itself as a security and management vendor for some time, claim that their existing business models illustrate the very approach that enterprises must take when approaching the individual strategies."When your job is to sit on the end point and tell it how it needs to look and behave, it's clear that we're ideally suited to tackle both of these problems from a management perspective," said Greg Toto, vice president of products and operations at BigFix."CIOs are annoyed with the volume, complexity and integration issues driven by the use of all these security and management point products in unison," Toto said. "The value proposition of a company like ours is to provide control for a broad range of these agents via a single management console."
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Symantec has admitted its flagship consumer security application, Norton AntiVirus 2005, has a security vulnerability that allows certain types of malicious script to infect a user&#39;s personal computer with a virus.
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Security software maker has released updated versions of its offerings for home computer users.