Product Reviews

While we may smugly note that our Macs haven't been targeted by viruses, this won't always be the case. They're as open as any other platform to more straightforward trickery to separate us from our personal data.

That's why the arrival of Norton Internet Security for Mac, featuring the company's AntiVirus, Confidential and Firewall applications, is timely. All three share a similar appearance, although they work as independent programs that can be called up from a single menu in the Mac's menubar.

A default level of automatic protection is set as soon as you install the programs, which, in the case of AntiVirus, means that it scans volumes and discs as you mount them. It's impossible to test AntiVirus' ability to combat new Mac-specific viruses, but it was adept at spotting infected PC files downloaded from a web browser, even when wrapped inside a .zip file. When an infected file is spotted, it's quarantined, and from the Quarantine window, you can delete or try to repair it.

Importantly for a program whose biggest current value is peace of mind, AntiVirus isn't particularly processor-hungry. Even when scanning, it didn't use more than a small fraction of the processor. In any case, you can set the program to scan manually rather than automatically and configure its scope, both in limiting the folders to scan, say to your Downloads or Mail folder, or setting it to ignore your iPod when you connect it.

Confidential is an assortment of tools that protect your Mac against data theft. Most visibly, it protects against websites 'phishing' for personal information. It does this both by comparing pages you visit against a list of known fraudulent sites and by dynamically analysing whether it's likely to be a phishing site. We were dismissive of the standalone version of the application when we reviewed

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it, but it has improved significantly since then.

Most importantly it now works inside Safari as well as Firefox. In both, it optionally installs a toolbar above the browser window that turns red if the site is suspected, or green if it has been verified as safe. Good visual clues, but both browsers have built-in anti-phishing tools, and this product didn't seem markedly better. Neither Safari nor Firefox analyse live pages, but they do flag suspect sites that are submitted to the phishing repository phishtank.com.

Confidential includes tools to prevent specified sensitive information from being sent over the Internet. It can also stop files containing this data from being opened or changed without permission. This feature generally works well, and finds sensitive files that contain data you specify almost instantly. To open them, you need to enter your Mac OS X admin name and password. Oddly though, when we attempted to move protected files in the Finder, the file didn't move even when we entered the password in the same way.

Some functions of Firewall replicate features present in Mac OS X's built-in firewall, such as setting which applications are allowed incoming connections. However, it also provides more information about data traffic and controls; not only what is connecting to your Mac, but also, like the better-known Little Snitch (obdev.at/products/littlesnitch), the applications that send information the other way. Most usefully, you can set the level of protection based on your location, which is handy if you travel and connect over unknown wifi networks.

You also get access to the Norton Deepsight, a list of IP addresses blocked automatically by Firewall. Sadly, as with a lot of this suite's features, this useful tool isn't clearly explained in the emaciated PDF manual.

Although inexpensive, the value of Norton Internet Security depends on how confident you are about online security. If you're already careful to resist phishing techniques, Confidential is perhaps overkill and antivirus alternatives such as the free ClamXav (clamxav.com) will be adequate for those on a budget, particularly as you only get a year's subscription to the suite's virus protection and scanning engine updates.