NortonLifeLock’s global research team, Norton Labs, today published its quarterly Consumer Cyber Safety Pulse Report, detailing the top consumer cybersecurity insights and takeaways from April through June 2022.

Leveraging the company’s global cyberthreat telemetry, the analysis includes new findings on how cybercriminals are using social media phishing attacks to steal people’s private information.

Norton Labs analysed a full year of phishing attacks on the top social media platforms, and while plenty of fake login pages designed to trick victims into inputting their login credentials were found, the diversity and complexity of lures went far beyond that one technique.

“Threat actors use social media for phishing attacks because it’s a low-effort and high-return way to target billions of people around the world,” said Darren Shou, head of technology, NortonLifeLock. “As social media is intertwined in our daily lives, it’s key to know how to spot the signs of a scam and keep a sharp eye on where requests for your information are coming from. Even better, consider strong, multi-layered security that can be on the lookout for you, too.”

Norton Labs uncovered the top tactics cybercriminals use to get victims to reveal personal information, and while classic login phishing pages are still the most common ploy, cybercriminals are finding new ways to deceive social media users.

Tactics include account lockouts – making it seem that a victim’s account has been locked due to “copyright violations”; follower generator services – luring victims to reveal login credentials or install malware on the promise of increasing follow count; and verified badge scams – prompting users to login to obtain, or not to lose, their verified status on the platform.

Another phishing campaign tactic aims to intercept temporary codes, to break into profiles with two-factor authentication enabled. These tokens are generally tied to the victim’s device and allow the scammer to perform privileged operations, such as modifying personal details or login credentials.

By the Numbers

From April to June 2022, Norton thwarted over 900 million threats, or around 10 million threats per day globally. In New Zealand, Norton blocked in total 4,851,389 threats, equating to an average of 53,312 blocks per day.

During that three-month period, there were:

• 22.6 million phishing attempts globally, with 37,183 blocked in New Zealand.
• 103.7 million file threats globally, with 275,463 blocked in New Zealand.

Globally, there were 302,000 mobile threats and 78,000 ransomware attacks.

The full Consumer Cyber Safety Pulse Report is available here, while more information and Cyber Safety guidance is available here: Norton Internet Security Center.

The post Norton Research Reveals Diverse Social Media Phishing appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

NortonLifeLock has just unveiled Game Optimizer or “GO,” a new feature that maximises gaming performance by freeing PCs from power-hungry program running in the background that tie up system resources.

“When I’m gaming, the last thing I want to think about is security,” said Katharine “KatContii” Conti, gaming influencer. “With Game Optimizer, not only is my information safe, but my game play is seamless. It was created by gamers for gamers and gives me peace of mind without sacrificing performance.”

The addition of Game Optimizer marks a revolutionary shift for PC gamers, reducing performance interruptions while still maintaining security, resulting in an immersive and smoother gaming experience. By freeing power-hungry programs to a single CPU core, Game Optimizer helps ensure all available computing power is allocated to the game for better performance. As an added benefit, Norton 360 for Gamers also offers optimised notifications, permanently silencing non-essential messages.

Norton 360 for Gamers customers will have access to Norton Crypto when it launches in the coming weeks. Currently available as part of NortonLifeLock’s early adopter program, Norton Crypto enables customers to safely and easily mine cryptocurrency while their devices are idle through its trusted Norton 360 platform.

“As gaming and cryptomining begin to take a larger role in people’s digital lives, it’s important we continue to quickly innovate and develop the tools that empower consumers to keep their information, devices and identity safe without interference,” said Gagan Singh, chief product officer, NortonLifeLock. “We want gamers to use Game Optimizer so they can stay focused on the challenges of their game, not the distraction and risk of cyber threats. We also want to help people put their PC’s idle time to good use with Norton Crypto providing an easy and safe way to mine cryptocurrencies.”

“Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for gamers to compromise their online safety to preserve gaming quality and performance”, said Mark Gorrie, Senior Director at NortonLifeLock. “Gaming in Australia has seen an increase since COVID-19, which means more Australians could be leaving themselves exposed to cybercrime. Game Optimiser is an exciting new technology that means gamers no longer have to make this compromise between cyber safety and game performance.”

In addition to providing gamers with boosted performance and an easy and safe way to mine cryptocurrency while their PCs are idle, Norton is also expanding Dark Web Monitoring to 13 additional countries including France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, Switzerland, Austria and Poland for Norton 360 for Gamers customers. Dark Web Monitoring continuously searches the dark web and notifies customers if their gamer tags, usernames, email addresses and other personal information is found.

Game Optimizer is now available for Norton 360 for Gamers customers.

Dark Web Monitoring will be available for new and existing customers across the 13 countries with Norton 360 plans.

The post Norton Levels Up Performance for PC Gamers appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

NortonLifeLock has announced the global availability of Norton 360 for Gamers, security reimagined for gamers.

“It’s never been more critical for gamers to have strong security in place and build good safety habits to protect themselves,” said Mark Gorrie, Senior Director at NortonLifeLock.

“With two-thirds of New Zealanders playing video games and nine out of 10 households owning a video game device, gaming has become an integral part of the way in which we communicate and interact with friends. This means gaming accounts and the personal information tied to them have become a lucrative target for cybercriminals. Norton 360 for Gamers is part of our vision to protect and empower people to live their digital lives. We want gamers to continue enjoying the gaming world, safe in the knowledge they have a cyber safety plan in place to help stay one step ahead of the cybercriminals.”

With online gaming on the rise during the pandemic, cybercriminals have taken aim at the lucrative industry that boasts more than 2.7 billion gamers globally. A new survey among nearly 3,000 gamers commissioned by NortonLifeLock and conducted by The Harris Poll found that many gamers are concerned about the trajectory of gaming security, with 68 percent of New Zealanders surveyed worried that gaming will become less secure in the future.

Further, 35 percent of those surveyed around the world say they have had a gaming account hacked. Locally, that number is similar with 32 percent of gamers in New Zealand having had a gaming account hacked, including 8 percent who have had their account hacked more than one time. Experts at NortonLifeLock warn that gamers will need to be more vigilant this year as cybercriminals recognise the value of their accounts and personal information.

Today’s gamers are faced with challenges that extend well beyond the game. From casual to hardcore PC gamers, personal information and digital assets abound in the gaming universe and are valuable to cybercriminals, putting gamers at risk for device vulnerabilities, phishing attacks and identity theft. A typical gaming account can include the gamer’s name, birth year, mailing address, email, mobile number, payment information, and other personal information that, with the right mix of information, could be used by an identity thief to wreak financial havoc.

Gamertags are ransacked for virtual items and personally identifiable information that are bought and sold for real money on the Dark Web. Once a gaming account has been breached, the gamer’s other accounts, from banking to social media, are at a much higher risk for account takeovers and fraud.

Norton 360 for Gamers was designed by gamers at NortonLifeLock to help protect PC gamers with advanced, multi-layered protection, including Dark Web Monitoring Powered by LifeLock, a first in cyber safety, which monitors up to 10 gamer tags and notifies gamers if their gamertags, usernames and email addresses are found on the Dark Web.

To date, NortonLifeLock has issued more than 60,000 notifications informing customers their gaming information was located on the Dark Web. Norton 360 for Gamers also offers optimised notifications, permanently silencing messages except the most essential, eliminating the tension between wanting security and gaming.

“Gamers pour their passion, time and money into their gaming PCs and accounts, but they’re notoriously apprehensive about security because they just don’t want to be interrupted or experience slowness, or they may think the free stuff is good enough,” said Bob Shaker, Head of Gaming at NortonLifeLock.

“Many of us at NortonLifeLock are gamers ourselves, and we wanted to reimagine how we approach security and develop features tailored to gamers’ needs, like limiting notifications that could interrupt a game and adding gamertag monitoring among the personal information we look out for on the Dark Web. We are excited to now offer Norton 360 for Gamers globally to help keep PC gamers safe.”

In addition to Dark Web Monitoring, key Norton 360 for Gamers features include:

• Secure VPN: Browse anonymously and securely by masking your IP address with a no-log VPN to help protect against DDOS attacks, doxxing and SWATing.
• Notification Optimisation: We’ll only notify you if your PC is under attack, your protection is at risk, or you aren’t using a feature you’re entitled to use — and give you control over product reminders.
• Full-Screen Mode Detection: Device security for PCs that detects when you’re using full-screen mode, and silences all but critical security alerts.
• PC SafeCam: Helps protect against potential stream bans and embarrassment with alerts on attempts to access your webcam so you can block them.

Norton 360 for Gamers offers protection for up to 3 PCs, Mac, smartphones or tablets.

Everyone that works on STG is a volunteer. If you like the site and its contents please think about donating. Even a small amount helps keep the servers running.

The post NortonLifeLock Makes Norton 360 for Gamers Available Globally appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

New year, new cyber nasties.

NortonLifeLock, producers of the Norton PC, mobile and Mac anti-virus software know this and have already planned ahead releasing the latest version of Norton 360 Premium.

From the box (or rather redemption code) the 360 Premium is good to go for all known cyber threats and during the course of the 12 month subscription with it’s very own Norton Lifelock. The software will update it’s anti-virus database so you can play, work and browse with full protection.

The Norton 360 Premium anti-virus is also configurable. Hell, it sure needs to be.

At times legitimate software and executables on PC can be flagged as spammy by an anti-virus. The free ones tend to prohibit yourself from allowing this function – not so with 360 Premium.

With my use of this new edition of Norton 360 Premium I found that the dashboard is intuitive, super easy to navigate and save settings for protecting your device and your internet connectivity are super easy to work through to play around with the settings for all features anti-malware, firewall, spam and phishing aswell as your very own secure VPN.

The VPN means that you can securely access your own designated files remotely through the Norton App on a smart device. Norton 360 Premium also comes with a 50GB cloud service too.

This new annual edition offers up protection for five devices within your household, Android, Windows, OSX and iOS are all covered. Norton 360 Premium also has a secure Password storage database.

For smartphones and tablets though you will need the App from the respective devices App Store.

Norton 360 Premium does not cause your PC or Mac to lag either.

Past anti-virus software has been known to be resource hungry. Unless you have a kitted out, high spec gaming RIG then you were in for as slow computing experience.

Over the years they have got better and like last years offering from Norton, it doesn’t make a dent even in small to medium spec’d PCs even when doing a system scan, which you can schedule yourself to auto-run.

Norton 360 Premium is designed with the basic to expert level user in mind, feature rich and is a cost effective way to protect your smart device investments for the entire family.

The post Norton 360 Premium (Software) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Symantec recently discovered 81 potentially unwanted applications (PUAs) on the Microsoft Store, some of which display pornographic images and gambling content. While some have been removed, most of these apps are still available to download from the app store.

The apps cover a range of different categories such as sports, games, news, tips, etc. They appear to be published by more than 30 different developers.

To trick users, the apps use familiar names from some popular brands in their titles, such as Wix Updates Application, Antivirus Avira App, Norton Antivirus Updates App, McAfee Antivirus Updates News, Tinder Dating Updates, Tips and Games, and Grindr Updates.

However, these apps have nothing to do with the brands or their original apps. In fact, some of them display content such as pornographic images and advertisements for gambling websites. Other apps merely redirect users to the legitimate website of the brand they are claiming to be related to but they all have the ability to display whatever content they chose at a later date.

At the same time, none of the apps state this behavior in the description section on the app store page. In fact, the apps all display innocuous screenshots provided by the developers, which are totally unrelated to the real functionality of the apps.

There is potential for more serious risks since the app is fully controlled by a malicious routing server, meaning that it is possible for the developer to inject malicious code of their choosing. This could, for example, be coin-mining scripts, allowing the app developers to generate profit from users who have installed their apps. The developers can also display phishing websites in the apps. In fact, some of the apps already show suspicious phishing content that requests credit card information.

Symantec explored the application packages of all 81 apps and found that the content of each looks very similar. This, combined with the fact that they are sharing the same server, makes it highly likely that these applications are published by the same group of developers.

Microsoft was notified about the discovery and said it would investigate. Several of the apps are no longer available on the Microsoft Store.

The post Dodgy Apps on Microsoft Store appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Norton by Symantec has launched a New Zealand VPN server for its Norton Secure VPN product, formerly known as Norton WiFi Privacy. The new Auckland based server will give users access to a New Zealand IP address while using the product.

Norton Secure VPN helps users secure private information like passwords, bank details and credit card numbers when using public Wi-Fi on a PC, Mac or mobile device. It also enables people to browse more anonymously and help block tracking for ads. With Norton Secure VPN, New Zealanders’ online privacy and anonymity is possible with the creation of a private network from a public internet connection. Norton Secure VPN helps encrypt sensitive data like passwords and credit card numbers and converts it into an unreadable, untraceable form until the information reaches its destination.

“We want New Zealanders to have best in class service and protection, which is why we’re investing in the country,” Mark Gorrie said Senior Director, Norton Pacific. “With the launch of our new Auckland server, Kiwis should experience better performance along with the same great security protection to help keep their personal and financial information safe.”

While the launch of the server is local, it does have global implications, bringing Norton’s global VPN location count to 29 with accessible locations such as the US, UK and Australia. More people can pay bills, check email and interact on social networks from cafes, airports or hotels knowing their most sensitive information remains more hidden and protected.

Norton Secure VPN’s Auckland server has launched at a critical time as New Zealanders prepare for their summer holiday travel. New Zealanders will be able to have more protection for their personal and financial information from hackers while using public Wi-Fi and use the product to access local music and video content such as TVNZ OnDemand and SkyGo.

“New Zealanders using Norton Secure VPN can have confidence that whether they are checking their bank accounts at the beach or shopping online at an airport, they can do so knowing their information has protection,” added Gorrie.

Norton Secure VPN for PC, Mac, iOS and Android devices is available now HERE at and good retailers. Norton offers a range of yearly pricing options starting at $44.99 NZD to cover one mobile device or $89.99 NZD for a PC or Mac.

The post Norton Secure VPN Adds New Zealand Server appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

McAfee, the device-to-cloud cybersecurity company, recently unveiled two new state-of-the-art cyber and physical security operations centers (SOC), named the McAfee Security Fusion Centers, located in Plano, Texas and Cork, Ireland.

McAfee Security Fusion Centers are designed to support full visibility and management of risks on a global scale. The purpose of the Fusion Centers is threefold: to protect McAfee, to identify new cybersecurity product needs, and to act as a best practices blueprint for customers and partners. The facilities are available on a monthly schedule for customers who want to visit and understand how to better manage the demanding requirements of their own security operations and to see human-machine teaming in practice.

The McAfee Security Fusion Centers are run by Grant Bourzikas, chief information security officer and vice president of Labs Operations at McAfee. Grant will be in Sydney later this year when he keynotes at MPOWER Cybersecurity Summit, Tuesday 31st October, 2018. 

“The McAfee Security Fusion Center was created as a blueprint that leverages security operations technologies in new and innovative ways, enabling greater collaboration between research teams, integration with endpoint detection and response, and allowing for the future scalability of cloud-based technology,” says Bourzikas. “We call ourselves Customer Zero because we are the first organisation to use McAfee’s new offerings and product updates, and because we share our learnings to help customers implement faster and more smoothly.”

Security operations has never been more essential or challenging for an organisation. Attacks are more sophisticated and attackers continue to become more skillful. At the same time, organisations struggle to find the expert talent required to maintain their detection tools and investigate potential threats. By utilising human-machine teaming and deploying automated and advanced analytics technologies to quickly elevate key insights and context, members of the McAfee Security Fusion Center team tasked with examining cyberthreats can focus their attention on high-value next steps, such as understanding a threat’s impact across the organisation and what’s needed to respond.

McAfee also announced a new security operations architecture, built on a new version of McAfee Enterprise Security Manager (McAfee ESM 11), the addition of McAfee Behavioral Analytics, new enhancements to McAfee Investigator and McAfee Advanced Threat Defense, and new integrations with McAfee Active Response. The entire new solution has been deployed in the McAfee Security Fusion Centers, positioning McAfee as its own Customer Zero and enabling McAfee to showcase a working blueprint for security operations in real-time.

McAfee ESM 11 and McAfee Behavioral Analytics are available to customers today. McAfee Investigator will be available in April, and enhancements to McAfee Advanced Threat Defense and McAfee Active Response will be available in May 2018.

The post McAfee Unveils New Global Security Operations Centers appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

McAfee, the device-to-cloud cybersecurity company, today announced to us at STG an expanded product portfolio that evolves security operations capabilities and allows for rapid response to today’s most advanced cybersecurity threats.

McAfee’s updated Enterprise Security Manager (McAfee ESM 11) leverages a new data architecture optimised for scalability, performance, faster search, and collaboration. This new architecture combined with the newly launched McAfee Behavioral Analytics, and enhanced McAfee Investigator, McAfee Advanced Threat Defense, and McAfee Active Response, will help security operation teams optimise their security infrastructure, leverage automation, improve detection, streamline workflows, and ultimately harness the power of human-machine teaming to improve response time and overall security outcomes.

“With companies struggling to keep up with the current threat landscape, the need for human-machine teaming has never been greater,” said Jason Rolleston, vice president of security analytics, McAfee. “Given the difficulty in finding skilled resources, enterprises need advanced analytics- and machine learning-powered solutions to augment the people they have. By combining the strength and speed of these new solutions with the power of human intellect, security operations teams become faster, smarter, more effective, and more efficient.”

McAfee’s enhanced security information and event management (SIEM) combined with advanced analytics will bring human-machine teaming to the next level by enabling security operations teams to more efficiently collect, enrich and share data. Then, the security operations teams can turn the security events into actionable insights that they can act on to confidently detect and correct sophisticated threats faster.

Today’s announcements also build upon McAfee’s leadership position within security information and event management (SIEM) solutions. Gartner named the company a Leader for the seventh consecutive year in the December 2017 “Magic Quadrant for Security Information and Event Management.”

Benefits from the updates and enhancements to McAfee ESM 11, McAfee Behavioral Analytics, McAfee Investigator and McAfee Active Response include an open and scalable data bus architecture at the heart of McAfee ESM 11 sharing huge volumes of raw, parsed and correlated security events to allow threat hunters to easily search recent events, reliably retain data for compliance and forensics, and enable data-hungry analytics applications.

The new McAfee ESM 11 architecture also allows for flexible horizontal expansion with active-active high availability, allowing organisations to rapidly query billions of events. Additional McAfee ESM appliances or virtual machines can be added at any point to add ingestion, query performance and redundancy. 

New big data security analytics and machine learning technology discover new and unusual high-risk security threats without requiring extensive configuration or knowledge, while McAfee Behavioral Analytics distills billions of security events down to hundreds of anomalies to produce a handful of prioritized threat leads. 

McAfee Behavioral Analytics integrates with the McAfee portfolio, including McAfee ESM and McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator, the Data Exchange Layer, and third-party security information and event management (SIEM) solutions.

Also included is the new McAfee Investigator with an Activity Feed which shares data with open source and third-party tools to streamline workflows and improve collaboration. This expanded investigation guides include logon anomalies and new navigation features to multi-select findings for faster case closure. 

Integration between McAfee Investigator and McAfee Active Response enables analysts to scope the impact of a threat across their endpoints in real-time. Enhanced integration between McAfee Active Response and McAfee Advanced Threat Defense enables investigators to view detailed sandbox reports and indicators of compromise (IOC) including a new threat timeline report that visualizes attack execution steps from a single workspace.

You can also keep Windows safe with powerful new capabilities to detect Powershell exploits and remediate by isolating a host.

McAfee ESM 11 and McAfee Behavioral Analytics are available to customers today. McAfee Investigator will be available in April, and enhancements to McAfee Advanced Threat Defense and McAfee Active Response will be available in May 2018.

The post McAfee Takes Human-Machine Teaming to Next Level appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Cyber criminals are rapidly adding cryptojacking to their arsenal and creating a highly profitable new revenue stream, as the ransomware market becomes overpriced and overcrowded, according to Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), Volume 23, released today.

“Cryptojacking is a rising threat to cyber and personal security,” said Mike Fey, president and COO, Symantec. “The massive profit incentive puts people, devices and organisations at risk of unauthorised coinminers siphoning resources from their systems, further motivating criminals to infiltrate everything from home PCs to giant data centres.”

Symantec’s ISTR provides a comprehensive view of the threat landscape, including insights into global threat activity, cyber criminal trends and motivations for attackers. The report analyses data from the Symantec Global Intelligence Network, the largest civilian threat collection network in the world which tracks over 700,000 global adversaries, records events from 126.5 million attack sensors worldwide, and monitors threat activities in over 157 countries and territories.

During the past year, an astronomical rise in cryptocurrency values triggered a cryptojacking gold rush with cyber criminals attempting to cash in on a volatile market. Detections of coinminers on endpoint computers increased by 8,500 percent in 2017.

With a low barrier of entry – only requiring a couple lines of code to operate – cyber criminals are harnessing stolen processing power and cloud CPU usage from consumers and enterprises to mine cryptocurrency. Coinminers can slow devices, overheat batteries, and in some cases, render devices unusable. For enterprise organisations, coinminers can put corporate networks at risk of shutdown and inflate cloud CPU usage, adding cost.

“Now you could be fighting for resources on your phone, computer or IoT device as attackers use them for profit,” said Kevin Haley, director, Symantec Security Response. “People need to expand their defences or they will pay for the price for someone else using their device.”

IoT devices continue to be ripe targets for exploitation. Symantec found a 600 percent increase in overall IoT attacks in 2017, which means that cyber criminals could exploit the connected nature of these devices to mine en masse. Macs are not immune either with Symantec detecting an 80 percent increase in coin mining attacks against Mac OS. By leveraging browser-based attacks, criminals do not need to download malware to a victim’s Mac or PC to carry out cyber attacks.

The number of targeted attack groups is on the rise with Symantec now tracking 140 organised groups. Last year, 71 percent of all targeted attacks started with spear phishing – the oldest trick in the book – to infect their victims. As targeted attack groups continue to leverage tried and true tactics to infiltrate organisations, the use of zero-day threats is falling out of favour. Only 27 percent of targeted attack groups have been known to use zero-day vulnerabilities at any point in the past.

The security industry has long discussed what type of destruction might be possible with cyber attacks. This conversation has now moved beyond the theoretical, with one in ten targeted attack groups using malware designed to disrupt.

Symantec identified a 200 percent increase in attackers injecting malware implants into the software supply chain in 2017. That’s equivalent to one attack every month as compared to four attacks the previous year. Hijacking software updates provides attackers with an entry point for compromising well-guarded networks. The Petya outbreak was the most notable example of a supply chain attack. After using Ukrainian accounting software as the point of entry, Petya used a variety of methods to spread laterally across corporate networks to deploy its malicious payload.

Threats in the mobile space continue to grow year-over-year, including the number of new mobile malware variants which increased by 54 percent. Symantec blocked an average of 24,000 malicious mobile applications each day last year. As older operating systems continue to be in use, this problem is exacerbated. For example, with the Android operating system, only 20 percent of devices are running the newest version and only 2.3 percent are on the latest minor release.

Mobile users also face privacy risks from grayware apps that aren’t completely malicious but can be troublesome. Symantec found that 63 percent of grayware apps leak the device’s phone number. With grayware increasing by 20 percent in 2017, this isn’t a problem that’s going away.

In 2016, the profitability of ransomware led to a crowded market. In 2017, the market made a correction, lowering the average ransom cost to US$522 and signaling that ransomware has become a commodity. Many cyber criminals may have shifted their focus to coin mining as an alternative to cashing in while cryptocurrency values are high.

Additionally, while the number of ransomware families decreased, the number of ransomware variants increased by 46 percent, indicating that criminal groups are innovating less but are still very productive.

The post Cryptojacking Skyrockets to the Top of the Attacker Toolkit appeared first on Shane the Gamer.

Antivirus software can always be a tough thing to weigh up, especially when you don’t have any experience with a certain brand.  There is the question of value and as the number of devices people have grows, there is an opportunity here which Norton fills well with its premium suite.

First off is how Norton Security Premium predominantly operates on a PC (but the full suite allows protection for up to five devices, including Android and iOS and even Mac).  I did notice a small bump in resources used on my PC between when it was running and when it wasn’t.  It wasn’t a big difference by any means and is significantly smaller than the last time I used Norton when it used to be resource hungry. If you are already maxing out your resources it will make a slight difference there, but this is expected with any software running in the background.

Running a full scan took less than an hour, which for context I’m used to taking a couple of hours so, to say I was impressed is an understatement.  Though no threats appeared it still took care of a bunch of Tracking Cookies which impressed me as they hadn’t been picked up in other scans. Though not being overly dangerous, I’d still rather they weren’t there.

The suite comes with a lot of pack in features worthy of your time.  The first is the cloud backup option of up to 25 GB of storage.  If you don’t use one of the many alternatives then it’s a great feature to use, but I couldn’t make a compelling argument to choose it over an alternative.  The other major feature I noted was the Identity Safe, which is a fantastic password storage solution.  There are other solutions to store your password securely and have them auto fill. Norton Identity is better than the ones I have used, but for a user without one it’s a fantastic way to make harder passwords you won’t remember or don’t need to as they are stored safely away in the cloud for you to access as needed.  If coming up with overly complex passwords isn’t something you know about the software has a password generator to help you there too.

One key feature to play with was the Norton Family tool which allows you to set profiles for your kids and will block content, or track it depending on how strictly you want to set it.  It can alert you how you want, whether by email or just by checking in the web portal which is quite handy, though the web portal wasn’t in real time.  This feature is quite handy as the block page gives the kids the chance to write in why they wanted to view that website, in case they were doing research and not just being mischievous.  Though it is worth noting that because it uses a browser plug in you will need to enable modes such as incognito in chromes settings because default incognito blocks plug ins.

The Android software that can use the same subscription was surprisingly well built.  The UI is super easy to use and it does a great job of defending your phone.  Aside from the usual scans, what stood out to me was it checked installed apps for settings that may not be secure, such as pointing out what information an app has that may be insecure.  If you still want an app there you can set Norton to ignore that, but it was handy to see just how much access some of my kid’s games were using.

Norton Security Premium is a great suite of software with some strong features to be used, especially if you don’t currently have alternatives for each feature, or just one to lien them up to one provider.  For a reasonable subscription price, it does a lot more than AV as well as doing a great job of AV across multiple devices, the android software being especially strong.

The post Norton Internet Security (Software) Review appeared first on Shane the Gamer.