Once upon a time, Symantec was a known leader in the computer software industry. They had compilers (Think C/C++), purchased and maintained Peter Norton's DOS / Windows Tools, and developed some products for the Mac. Today, they are well known for their Corporate Antivirus tools, although their reporting and functionality leaves room for improvement. More recently, they have expanded into fighting spyware, and as discovered by Network Computing, the spyware component fails to measure up.

Feel free to go over to Network Computing's site, and read the article for yourself.

To the general public, anything that causes the computer to do something unexpected, aside from an obvious hardware failure (I saw smoke! Seriously!), can be blamed on a virus. The lines among the types of malware are blurred -- viruses are lumped in with worms, spyware, viruses, and macro viruses. Even here at DaniWeb, we do not differentiate among the animals -- we lump them into one forum for innoculation.

So, people expect a product like Norton Internet Security (NIS) to be a one-stop solution for protection on the very vunerable Windows platform. Companies like Symantec should know that the internet is an explosive environment, and that more and more people are attaching their computers to a high-speed network connection (DSL/Cable). I'd have to argue that a malfunctioning product like NIS 2006 is more of a problem than a solution -- people will believe they are protected, while in reality, they are not.

Perhaps it is time to look at McAfee, Panda, and/or Zone Labs for additional layers of security.