Symantec's Norton 360 will support Vista when the next-generation consumer protection service ships. The Vista version of Norton Confidential will ship in early February, and Norton Save & Restore will be Vista-ready some time after the operating system's late-January consumer launch, Kim said. On Wednesday, the company will ship versions of Norton Internet Security and Norton Antivirus that are Vista-ready, with other products to follow in the next months. Symantec is also readying new versions of its consumer software that will run on Microsoft's upcoming Vista operating system. So you need to bolster signature-based approaches with behavior-based approaches.' 'Signature-based technologies for viruses and spyware certainly work, but their coverage is increasingly thin. The software comes not a moment too soon, he added. Symantec already sells a similar behavior-based security product to enterprise users, called Critical System Protection, but with SONAR, Symantec is finally saying that its behavior-based techniques are ready for the consumer desktop market, said Andrew Jaquith, senior analyst with Yankee Group Research Inc.

The software is built on technology that Symantec acquired in its 2005 purchase of WholeSecurity. SONAR makes its determination based on whether the software does things such as add a shortcut on the desktop or insert itself into the Windows Add/Remove programs list, both of which indicate it probably isn't malware, Kim said. SONAR uses an algorithm to evaluate hundreds of attributes relating to software that is running on the computer, so it can spot malicious software, whether it's already been identified by Symantec researchers or not. Zero-day attacks are based on flaws that are unknown, or have not yet been patched by the vendor, and they are particularly effective against signature-based antivirus protection.

'It's zero-day protection that doesn't rely on threat signatures.'

'We're very excited about the release of SONAR,' Kim said.

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