Symantec

Home users need not apply, but businesses looking for the best way to manage their network's security now have a new solution to consider.

Symantec announced Wednesday the launch of its Hosted Endpoint Protection, a cloud-based protection service for small- and medium-size organizations. The company says that this new solution offers comprehensive security for the clients' computer systems without additional hardware or management software.

Customers will be able to protect their Windows-based laptops, desktops, and file servers using a Web-based console. Traditionally, in order to have this level of comprehensive protection, including Symantec's existing Endpoint Protection, a company would need a dedicated piece of hardware or a server in its network to manage it.

According to Symantec, the new Software as a service (SaaS) approach of the new Hosted Endpoint Protection is much easier to deploy and set up, requires minimal maintenance, and is therefore suitable for businesses that have limited resources.

Symantec claims that the Hosted Endpoint Protection leverages its Global Intelligence Network and benefits from the network's rapid threat identification and response. The service offers automatic security updates, so it helps the customers keep their employees' computers protected both at the office and on the go.

Key features and benefits of Symantec's Hosted Endpoint Protection are:… Read more

Symantec has announced it will buy encryption vendors PGP and GuardianEdge Technologies to boost its lineup.

The security company plans to integrate encryption products from PGP and GuardianEdge into its data loss prevention suite and endpoint protection products, it said in its acquisition announcement on Thursday.

"The two acquisitions will give us a market-leading position in the $1.4 billion per year encryption business," Symantec enterprise security group vice president Francis deSouza told ZDNet UK on Thursday. "At Symantec, we're focused on making data protection easier to manage, and these acquisitions represent a big step forward.&… Read more

A hole in Microsoft's Windows SMB2 (Server Message Block) protocol was the most attacked vulnerability last year, followed by holes in Adobe Reader and Flash Player, Internet Explorer 7, and Windows MPEG2 ActiveX Control, according to a Symantec report to be released on Tuesday.

Of Web-based attacks, suspicious PDF file downloads was the top method, representing nearly half of such attacks, followed by six attacks on IE, one targeting Adobe SWF (Shockwave Flash), and two targeting MPEG2 ActiveX Controls, the Symantec Global Internet Security Threat Report found.

Despite being the most attacked browser, IE had 45 reported vulnerabilities, compared … Read more

You can now grab and stress-test Norton AntiVirus and Norton Internet Security 2011 public betas. These free testers are partially baked previews of the consumer products Symantec will release later this year.

They continue the course that Symantec set for Norton with the 2009 version and appear to retain the fast scan benchmarks of the 2010 version. There's not much that's dramatically new; however, there's a lot more Norton Insight and Quorum data that gets exposed than before. This makes the programs feel more connected to both the Norton Quorum community-sourced protection data and to your own … Read more

Though we're only a few months into 2010, Symantec is already offering a preview of its 2011 security lineup.

The company launched on Monday beta releases of its 2011 Norton Internet Security suite and Norton AntiVirus, along with new, free security tools. They are all available for download.

Norton Internet Security 2011 is the company's full suite, offering antivirus, antispyware, firewall, and antispam tools. In past years, Norton's security software has been dinged by some for being slow and chewing up too much memory. But Symantec said it is sought to improve its 2011 versions to coax … Read more

More malware is now coming out of China than from any other country, according to a new report from Symantec.

The United States still leads the world in the number of malware attacks sent from mail servers. Symantec's report (PDF) found U.S. mail servers responsible for distributing 36.6 percent of all global malware in March, followed by China at 17.8 percent and Romania at 16.5 percent.

Symantec captured these results by analyzing the IP addresses of sending mail servers. The company uncovered a large amount of malware from the United States in large part because … Read more

You may want to start keeping a closer eye on where you click if you live in Seattle.

Among 50 U.S. cities studied for their vulnerability to cybercrime, Seattle came out on top as the riskiest place, followed by Boston, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, according to the report "Norton's Top 10 Riskiest Online Cities," released Monday.

In an effort to study and rank the nation's riskiest cities for cybercrime, Symantec partnered with research firm Sperling's BestPlaces. The two companies used their own internal research and also checked out key facts and figures … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--For many people, the concepts of botnets, software exploits, and underground marketplaces are fairly abstract. To solve that problem, Symantec has created a Black Market exhibit that attempts to make these virtual ideas more tangible.

The security company gave tours of its Black Market at the RSA security conference here this week.

"We really wanted to create a sensory experience so that everyone would realize that cybercrime is happening to us all the time. We tried to portray the view that you are being scammed and defrauded $20 at a time," Rhonda Shantz, vice president of consumer … Read more

Spam now accounts for close to 90 percent of all e-mail worldwide due to a surge in February, according to Symantec.

Two botnets named Grum and Rustock helped push spam levels up 5.5 percent in February over the prior month, according to the security firm's report (PDF). After doing business as usual over the past year, Grum suddenly sprang to life in February, increasing the amount of spam it generated by 51 percent. As a result, the botnet is now to blame for 26 percent of all global spam.

Rustock also surged last month, pushing up global spam … Read more