KEY POINTS:
The PC security software market is crowded, meaning the various players need to find a point of difference to convince users to use their product to protect against viruses and other internet threats. Simon Hendery spoke to Tom Powledge, US-based vice-president of product development within the consumer products division of Symantec Corporation when he visited Sydney last week. Powledge is responsible for managing and developing Symantec's Norton consumer line of security products.
Connect: How are home computer security needs changing?
Powledge: Computing is becoming more internet-centric. Consumers are spending a lot more time online and we're seeing that a lot of threats are being delivered through attacks on websites now - where websites are being compromised and used to attack your computer and install malicious code. The primary way people were getting viruses on their computers a few years ago was via emails. Now the primary attack method is through the web.
Connect: How is Norton responding to these changes?
Powledge: One of the historic criticisms of security software has been that it slows down your computer. In the past, security companies have had to make a trade-off between the amount of security they deliver and the performance of the PC. We're saying we don't want to make that trade-off anymore. Our goal is to provide rock-solid security and at the same time have zero impact on the performance of your PC. It's a big goal and it requires significant re-engineering of our products.
Connect: How will you achieve that zero-impact goal?
Powledge: The way security software works today is it scans every file on your computer. There's a lot of processing overhead associated with that activity. One thing we're doing is implementing a new technology to essentially identify known "good" files and never scan them. The idea is we'll get to a point where we only need to scan, on a regular basis, maybe 5 per cent of the files on your computer. [That will lead to] a huge performance improvement in the background scanning done by our software.
Connect: With some security software vendors giving away the basic versions of their products for free, what is Norton doing to enhance its place at the premium end of the market?
Powledge: We've spent a lot of money in changing the way we do customer support. Traditionally, customers would say it's hard to find the phone number to get support and it's hard to talk to a real person. We decided to change all that. Within a few clicks you can be in a chat session with a Symantec representative, who can remote-control your PC if you want, and the phone number is right there. We're seeing vastly improved customer satisfaction as a result of these improvements.
Connect: What has improving the support service taught you?
Powledge: What we've found is users have a lot of angst about their computers. We're finding that there are segments of consumers out there who just need help. [As a result] we are getting into the business of providing remote control support services for a range of PC problems, not necessarily related to Symantec products. We're providing PC tune-up services where a Symantec representative will come onto your PC [via a remote connection] and they'll go through a service checklist, looking at your settings, removing programs you don't need.
Connect: With security threats getting more sophisticated, how else are you staying on top of them?
Powledge: We have our technologists working on a new system based on "reputation" of files where we're able to determine the reputation of a given file, and whether it's a safe piece of software or malware [malicious software]. Software that's running on millions of PCs is more likely to be safe. The other factor we add in is the user's behaviour - users who have not been infected [with malware on their PCs] are less likely to be infected in the future. The idea is that based on the prevalence of a file and who is using a particular file, we can calculate the likelihood that it's a piece of malware.
* Simon Hendery travelled to Sydney as a guest of Symantec.
