Category: Product

The new offerings include a Norton Confidential Online Edition that promises more secure online transactions, an identity-protection partnership with VeriSign, a security services partnership with Accenture, and new Symantec products for improving database and e-mail security. It promises to help banks protect their online customers from phishing, pharming, and other scams targeted at stealing personal information and money.

Symantec’s relationship with Accenture will expand Symantec’s 1,000-person services operation around mitigating compliance risks, managing security operations, and building more secure applications.

Symantec Database Security monitors data flowing to and from databases and, depending upon a company’s security policies, alerts administrators whenever it detects data containing intellectual property or sensitive information being sent out of the database. “It acts as a security camera rather than a security guard,” says Jeremy Burton, group president of Symantec’s security and data management group, who adds that future versions of Database Security will allow administrators to automatically block such data from being distributed.

The company also expanded its movement into the e-mail security market with the announcement of its Mail Security 8300 Series appliance, set to ship in November. The 8300 Series will be available as part of the Secure Exchange products and services that Symantec offers with Dell.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=S22OS4QIDOOJEQSNDLPCKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=193200301

“We want to get away from the Windows operating system, which has quite a few vulnerabilities within the OS itself, plus any vulnerabilities in apps installed next to us on the OS,” Gary Sabala, product manager for the Symantec virtual security appliance, told internetnews.com. “What we’re trying to do is create this isolated silo of an execution environment that we think is much more tamper resistant to threats on the main Windows OS, but is also an isolated environment where the IT manager can have a high degree of control,” .

http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3635806

Oracle counts auditing and compliance applications as part of its security arsenal as well. In fact, compliance has been a big driver of the security business, Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s senior VP of server technology said Wednesday.

“Customers said they want to let their users search like it’s Google but without giving them access to information they shouldn’t see,” Oracle Co-President Charles Phillips said.

For Investors Bank & Trust, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Investors Financial Services Corp. that already makes use of Oracle E-business applications and databases, convenience can’t be overlooked in Oracle’s appeal as a security provider.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=193006361

At the same time, Symantec wants to help businesses to be more careful about whom they let connect to their networks, the underlying principle of the emerging market for network-access control technology.

Yet as Symantec expands into new areas, and other high-profile vendors like Microsoft and Cisco expand their security offerings, the company could face unprecedented competition.

The company last week announced it’s teaming with Juniper Networks to build unified threat-management appliances, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and access-management and endpoint-compliance devices based on Juniper hardware and Symantec software.

“We need to understand all of the risks” that customers face, “although we don’t have to provide a Symantec-branded solution,” Bregman says. This sentiment was also evident in Symantec’s announcement Wednesday with Dell to help midsize businesses get control of their e-mail systems through a new offering called Secure Exchange.

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In a conference call with media and analysts, Symantec Chairman John Thompson and Juniper Chairman Scott Kriens outlined the business relationship through which they said the companies will be able to provide end-to-end security protection for their customers’ networks and desktop computers. By pooling the data that Symantec receives from the estimated 100 million desktops on which its security applications run worldwide, along with the threat detection capabilities built into the massive networks managed by Juniper, considered the second largest company in its space behind Cisco Systems, the partners will be able to predict how threats will develop and when they may arrive far more effectively than on their own, the executives said. “At its core one of the real drivers of this partnership is the ever-changing threat landscape, as over even the last few months we haven’t just seen a rise in the number and variety of threats, but also in the demand for improved speed in responding to these attacks,” Thompson said.

The announcement between the two massive vendors comes just under a week after Microsoft and Cisco announced the completion of their work to create interoperability between their respective NAC (network access control) technologies, a partnership that many industry watchers believe could drive future adoption of those products. While the Microsoft-Cisco partnership deals primarily with network access tools and the enforcement of desktop security policies, the Symantec-Juniper marriage will influence products in nearly every area of the IT security landscape, from PC anti-virus tools to network intrusion detection technologies and beyond, he said.

Among the other noteworthy elements of the deal detailed by the executives was Thompson’s announcement that Symantec has ceased development of custom security hardware for the UTM (unified threat management) market, where it will now depend on Juniper. The newly sourced Symantec tools are expected to arrive in Juniper products within the next 90 to 120 days, the companies said. Symantec will also begin licensing Juniper’s wireless access technology for use in its own endpoint security products, with plans to begin offering those tools to customers sometime in the next several months.

At least one industry analyst said the deal could work out favorably for the two partners, at least in the sense that they will no longer be preoccupied with trying to create products that are considered comparable to each others’. Symantec will be able to walk away from the custom security hardware sector and focus more attention on its software business, while Juniper can tap into its partner’s expertise instead of spending lots of money trying to compete with Symantec’s anti-virus tools, said Andrew Jaquith, an analyst with Boston-based Yankee Group Research.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2015042,00.asp?kc=EWWHNEMNL091406EOAD

One change this year is in the desktop firewall. Symantec has determined that consumers are having a hard time configuring the firewalls based on prompts, so Norton Internet Security 2007 will set the firewall’s parameters based on its own analysis of how desktop software attempts to communicate with the Internet.

Norton Internet Security will also have a new “security history” feature to display the actions the software took or even undo them if desired.

While Norton AntiVirus and Norton Internet Security are available beginning tomorrow, the vendor envisions other consumer products for the future.

The third Windows XP-based based desktop product Symantec announced today, Norton Confidential, is a brand-new entry that was developed to protect consumers during e-commerce transactions. Norton Confidential will block consumers from visiting known or suspected phishing sites. While it does some target malware eradication, Norton Confidential does not contain the full antivirus/antispyware eradication capability of Norton AntiVirus. The purpose of Norton Confidential is to protect the transactions of Web users and ensure that a Web site is genuine, not a phishing site. “We keep score on nearly 120 different things on that Web site,” Rosenkrantz said, noting that the capability is based on the e-commerce protection technology gained through the acquisition of security start-up WholeSecurity.

Norton AntiVirus 2007 costs $40, and Norton Internet Security and Norton Confidential cost $50.

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