While you’re innocently checking your email at Starbucks, someone could be stealing the password to your email account with a wifi sniffer. David Hall, Consumer Product Marketing Manager, Symantec Asia Pacific, explained and demonstrated how our identity and personal information could be stolen in just four minutes online. Shocking.

David went on to tell us about phishing – the 419 scam and the Nigerian Prince scam, fake codecs, keygens, malvertisements, those horrible horrible pop up windows telling us our computer may be infected, better click on the button and run a scan now (which starts installing a virus instead of scanning for one now). I”ve learned to recognize most of them but what I haven’t seen before was SEO poison.

Within two hours after the Haiti earthquake, the digital terrorists have embedded viruses into pages that are SEO optimized to appear on the first page of your search. Norton found 19 out of 20 sites to be poisoned (that’s almost the entire first page of your search result) and David showed us a video from their lab tracking poisoned links on search pages after the Haiti earthquake, Tiger Woods scandal and a few other newsy events. Two to four hours is how fast these cyber criminals take to hit search pages to get their victim’s personal information. Thankfully, Norton has a free service online to help you check if a site is safe by copying and pasting that URL into Norton Safe Web to verify http://safeweb.norton.com.

Why are they after our info? Information is money. Credit card details are worth $0.90 each and email information is worth $10 each. Or you can be the guy that writes the program that pops up the evil window. He makes US$19K a week, more than the President of the United States.

So change your email password now and make sure to change it frequently. You know the drill, at least 6 characters long, one capital letter, one number and one symbol. Then you wonder, how the hell am I going to remember all the new passwords every time? Never mind, got an app for that. But how to come up with all these passwords? I too struggle with what password to use every time I had to change my password. David gave an example of how he comes up with them. He picks a song then uses the first word on the first line of that song as a password, the next time he changes it, he’ll go to the first word on the second line and so on. You can pick a poem too if you like.

We had an interesting time talking with David and I’ll just sum it up:

1. Most of the world’s viruses comes from the US followed by East Europe. Haha and we thought it was China (death penalty there perhaps).
2. Most popular platform – Windows (no surprize there), second is Apple (whose owners don’t believe there are Apple viruses at all) and third is linux (whose owners are aware of viruses but don’t believe it’ll hit them at all).
3. Viruses hitting mobile devices – Symbian (Nokia) is the most popular platform. Wait, there are mobile viruses? Apparently so. There is one that clearly invades someone’s privacy and it is marketed as an app called “Cheating Spouse”. If you have this installed into someone’s phone, you can see what number the phone has called even after the number is cleared by the owner, etc.
4. Viruses can also be stuffed into USBs that you buy from the shop. So scan every storage devices from now on.

Finally, we got down to Norton Antivirus. First, my personal experience. I’ve used Norton a long long time ago and stopped because it got so heavy. When it was scanning, everything just slows down to a halt. AVG was new and I switched to AVG and it also became sluggish after awhile. I moved on to Kaspersky then McAfee then Avast.

What’s with all these antivirus software starting out great then slowly suck the juice out of your processor as time goes on? I’ve learned never to buy an antivirus license for more than a year because the virus definition piles up and slows everything down.

Now why would I want to get back to Norton? I guess Symantec read my mind because here comes the benchmark reports from Dennis Technology Labs placing Norton 360 version 4.0 at the top first or second place in the fastest loading time, scanning speed and accuracy rate. They are managing virus definition files better and Norton 360 launched in September 2009 includes a reputation-based technology that crowd source from millions of users in their community to fight web-based threats.

Anyways I have been testing out Norton 360 version 4.0 antivirus for a week now and it is working very well. The UI has improved a lot from what I remember and I like how Safe Web is built in to show me what links on a search page is safe to click on. It also comes with performance improvement features such as PC Tuneup to diagnose, cleanup and optimize the PC. I ran all these first before doing a deep file scan. I have to say it’s fast, really fast. The new Norton Antivirus is worth a try if you’re not using it already. Let’s hope the performance lasts.

Where to get it:
Norton 360 v 4.0 has just been released in stores across Malaysia. You can also get it online at symantec.com. It supports Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. Suggested retail price is RM229 for the standard edition for three PC license and RM119 for one PC license. It also comes with 2GB of online storage space. These are for one year only. The premium edition is RM279 and comes with 25GB of online storage. (Cloud storage is becoming a popular bundling feature, it’s just like PA insurance hey). If you just want to try before you buy, Symantec online lets you try Norton’s full standard version free for one month.