Norton 360 Version 4: Complete PC Security Solution

Norton 360 is a complete security solution for PCs, not just an anti-virus software. It includes lot of tools which makes your PC totally safe. Let’s go through each one of them in brief:

PC Security:

Norton 360 comes with all in one set it & forget it automated virus & spyware protection. This system effectively blocks viruses, spyware, Trojan horses, worms, bots, and rootkits. Norton Bootable Recovery Tool repairs, restores and boots severely infected, which is very useful when your PC is not booting because of an infection. Norton has Real-time SONAR technology which detects emerging spyware and viruses before traditional definitions are available making sure you are protected from upcoming threats. Norton firewall quietly defends against hackers from hacking your PC.

Identity protection:

Norton Identity protection securely stores your login, credit card details & makes it easy to shop at online stores. It guards against key-loggers by auto filling the forms with your credentials. Blocks phishing websites automatically to make sure your personal information doesn’t land in wrong hands.

Back up & Restore:

Norton backup allows you to back up important data securely on their servers. Backup can be setup in three simple steps:

What? – What all data you want to backup. Select all the directories which you want to backup.

Whare? – Where you want to store the backup. You will get to choose between local drive & online storage which Norton provides. Norton provides upto 25 GB of online storage based on the package you are buying.

When? – When you want to run backups. Here you can choose between Automatic, weekly, monthly or manual.

PC Tuneup:

PC tuneup comes with set of tools which helps keep your PC clean. Disk optimization optimizes the hard drive and free ups more disk space. PC Tuneup automatically finds and fixes the problems which are making your PC slow. It also has clean up utilities to take care of unwanted temporary files & cookies which improves the start-up speed of the computer.

Overall Norton 360 is a total solution with set it & forget it protection. You have to go through the setup only once & concentrate on work which you want to do rather thinking about security risks.

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

Seriously, been using free anti virus since years, but my computer is still vulnerable & keep getting affected again & again. I don’t understand why they aren’t powerful. For me, an anti-virus software should be “Install & Forget”, it should be capable of taking care off all sorts of malicious bad software, trojans, spywares & let me concentrate on work!

Norton Internet Security 2010 does just what I wanted to. It takes care of all bad stuff & allows me to do my work peacefully. As you can see in the below screenshot, NIS has got really nice dashboard which tell you everything about current processes.

Clicking on the performance button shows how NIS is performing on your machine, how many issues it has found, details of the issues it found, memory/CPU consumption ..etc, everything plotted over a nice graph.

Elegant settings window allows you to configure NIS as per your requirements. Certain things which you might already know like scheduling scans, network settings, computer settings, web settings, everything comes under this. All these settings have a simple button which can turn ‘on’ or ‘off’ anytime .

We surf internet all the time. But, the fact is we find new sites via search engines (or I can say just Google?). NIS nicely integrates with Google search results page & shows whether the listed links are safe to visit or not. In my opinion this itself hugely reduces chance of getting infected!

With NIS you can have better understanding of installed applications. Norton scans every installed application & automatically finds out whether to trust the application or not & assigns proper access rights. Norton also tracks CPU & memory usage history of all applications!

Today, my friend’s came come with an infected thumb drive & asked me to format it since he was unable to fix it with the free anti-virus he had. I just plugged the thumb drive in, NIS automatically scanned the drive, found the threat!! I just clicked “Fix” & bingo! NIS took around 5 to 10 seconds to fix it & all the data was safe.

It just covers everything! I don’t think my PC would ever get affected with NIS installed on it! There’s still a lot of settings & configuration available, I just gone through few which impressed me.

I wrote before on Tech Bangalore about transaction errors at ATM. Once I got a transaction failure error when withdrawing money from ATM & didn’t get any cash, but money got debited from my account!! I called customer care right away, but it took 35 days to get back the money. Lot of people faced the same problem, many got it back, many didn’t!! They all commented on my blogpost seeking help, but I was helpless myself!

Now RBI (Reserve Bank of India) has sent a circular to all banks about Reconciliation of transactions at ATMs failure. As per that, the bank which the cutomer hold his account with, must return the money back to the customer’s account within 12 working days from the date of complaint. If bank fails to do that, it has to credit customers account Rs.100 everyday after 12 days until they return the money.

So, if you end up with a transaction failure at ATMs, contact customer support imeedietly. Keep the transaction receipt for reference & also note down the reference number for the complaint you registered. Hope no worries now!!

You can access the original copy of the circular here

Recently, from almost a month SMSs from Banks, Service Providers, Companies have started prefixing something like ID, AT, VK…etc. What’s all this after all!!? Here I am to explain you what it is! Normally these SMSs originates from a Bulk SMS provider where you can use 11 digit Alpha-Numeric characters as "Sender". But there were some security risks in this method. I was able to give a phone number as "Sender" & it appears as that person at the recipient end. Basically there was a chance to send SMSs as a different person! I was actually using this to fool my friends.

But the new TRAI regulation insisted bulk SMS providers to restrict the "Sender ID" to 8 characters. Other three characters should be used to specify who is the service provider & where it’s originated from. Say for example: HDFCBANK sends an SMS to you using bulk SMS provider located at Tamil Nadu which uses Airtel. You will receive it as AT-HDFCBANK. First character specifies which service provider the message is being originated & the second character specifies from which location it’s originated. Here is the table which has details of these SMS codes:

Service Provider Codes:

So, combination of these two constitutes the first two digit of ?Sender? followed by an hyphen (-) & actual sender name.

There were so many instances which kept on proving vulnarabilities of Gmail. Many people on Orkut lost their account including my cousin due to this vulnurablities. In most of the cases it’s hard to get back your account. My friend Parashuram, who is also an Open Social developer has created a widget/gadget which keeps looking at the activities on your Gmail account & notifies whenever something suspecious happens. To use this Gmail Burglar Alarm application, you should first enable labs feature “Add any gadget by URL” by going to “Settings–>Labs–>Add any gadget by URL”. After enabling it, goto “Gadgets” tab under Settings & add gadget from URL “http://gmailids.appspot.com/gids.xml“. You can view much detailed video demonstration on adding this application/gadget into your gmail account here.

The gadget sits in your gmail sidebar & keeps tracking login/logout time, browser, OS, IP …etc. The gadget creates two calendars inside your google account, one to keep track of all the activities on your account & the other to send notification SMS when something suspecious happens. Interesting fact about this gadget is, it uses Google calendar to send SMS! Since gadget makes use of your calendars to keep the data, all the data remains with you.

Limitations:

Though this is one of the steps you can take to avoid hackers getting into your account, this can’t be ultimate. This gadget has few limitations. Gmail Burglar Alarm tracks logins only from web browsers. Can’t track logins from other applications like Gmail Mobile client, Mail Clients like thunderbird or from mobile browser.

Disclaimer:

Be careful while adding these kind of gadgets into your gmail account. Add them only from trusted sources. Gmail Burglar Alarm gadget is made with good intentions in mind. But similar gadget can also be made to steal your account password!

Headover to Parashuram’s blog to know more & install this security gadget.

Yesterday Leeladhar wrote on ControlEnter about an SMS scam. You might receive an SMS saying you have won lottery prize of Rs.xxxx, claim it by calling following number. Which refers to an international number, upon calling subscribers might be charged as high as Rs.500. Airtel is displaying a alert message about this scam on it’s main page:

?Unsolicited fraudulent SMS?s are being sent to various subscribers informing them that they have won a prize and need to call an international number to collect their prize. When calls are made to the number in the text message the subscribers are billed a high amount (upto Rs 500 per minute).Subscribers are cautioned not to respond to such SMS?s?

So, don’t reply by calling to numbers provided in SMSs. Educate your friends about this scam by sharing this information.

Note: You can use “Google Friend Connect” on Tech Bangalore to send the link to your gmail contacts by clicking on “Invite Friends” after logging into it.

Many of us use gmail because of it’s simple design & featureset it has to offer us. Google has introduced a new security feature for gmail, remote lagout. Many of use more than two computers to login to gmail. If you take my example, I login to gmail from home & office. Some times we often leave the browser opened & not being logged out of gmail, if the computer is at office or any public place your account might be mis-used. Now sitting at home computer you can logout of gmail in office computer or any other computer.

Footer in gmail contains your session details, when you last logged in & from which IP.

You can click on “Details” link which shows you a pop-up having details about your last sessions.

Check for all the sessions, see all are yours or somebody else is logging into your account! Click on “Sign out all other sessions” to sign out of gmail at all other places exept the current.

It’s hard time for Blackberry in India. Some Indian security agencies have asked RIM (Research In Motion, Blackberry maker) to provide algorithm to decrypt messages. If they don’t, It may lead to termination of Blackberry services in India! RIM is in touch with Indian government to resolve this issue.

Government has some security concerns to be addressed by RIM. RIM is providing Blackberry services around 130 countries in compliance with regulatory requirements of governments. But no other government has asked them to provide their algorithms. Their algorithm is the big plus to them, & they might not want to share it.

Blackberry is a very powerful service offering email & internet services on the go. It’s been one of the best business phones available. Banning it might cause lot of loss to India itself. Hope they will come to some sort of agreements with government to continue services in India.

More detailed post about the issue is at Business Standards

Keyloggers are key stroke recorders which can record all keystrokes made on your keyboard! There are two types of keyloggers, hardware & software. Hardware keyloggers can be attached to keyboard, placed below keyboard or even some keyloggers comes built in with keyboard. External keyloggers are noticeable by the user, while built in keyloggers are not. There are various types of software keyloggers also, kernel based & hook based are popular. Kernel based keyloggers resides at kernel level, which gains unauthorized access to hardware (keyboard). Kernel based keyloggers can be in the form of keyboard drivers, so be careful while installing drivers from unknown sources. Hook based keyloggers, hook to keyboard using functions provided by OS & records keystrokes.

So, let it be your banking password or email account password, it can be easily recorded. Secured encrypted connection wont avoid keylogging, it secures your password after entering & secures until it travels to server. Software keyloggers can also be programmed to send recorded keystrokes to a pre-defined email ID, to upload keystrokes to FTP server or even to access & monitor log on your local machine via internet.

How to prevent from keyloggers:

Web Keyboard: Many banks provide you with online keyboard, make use of this while logging into your banking account.

Firewall: Use a firewall which alerts you when any application tries to connect to internet. Few firewalls are available for free, Comodo is one of those.

Anti Spyware: Many anti spyware softwares can detect keyloggers & cleans your PC.

Auto form fillers: Using form fillers on your browsers will avoid keylogging & also saves your time. There’s an extension called “iMacro” for Firefox, which helps you record any event you make on Firefox & playback whenever required. Get this Firefox addon at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3863

Blocking unwanted calls from people you hate or from unknown people is the feature I think we should have on our mobile phone by default. I personally tired up with lot of promotional calls from tele-callers. Though many banks & services offers you to register for “Do Not Disturb”, you still receive many calls from other tele-callers. Vodafone was the first to provide “Call blocking system” to help it’s consumers avoid such calls (but at Rs.99/month). But I have not yet heard of similar service by other providers.

Fortunately there is an application which blocks unwanted calls on any network. Epocware Handy’s Blacklist is a series 60 application that blocks unwanted calls. In first run options will be provided for blocking calls from your contact list, recent callers or unknown numbers. It also provided with an option of adding rejected calls into black list automatically. It also keeps log of all blocked numbers for 60 days.

The dis-advantage of software is, It will not notify you when a call is blocked. You have to check your log to know which numbers are blocked. The application is priced $19.95 (Rs.785), I think is the better option to go instead of paying monthly rental to service provider for same. Purchase this application here.