symantec - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Vendors challenged to justify $Kiwi pricing

  ICT buyers are crying foul over local vendor pricing, saying the differential with US pricing is out of hand as the kiwi dollar surges in value.

• Symantec makes personnel changes in Asia-Pacific

  Symantec's local managing director, David Sykes, and regional channel director, John Donovan, have abruptly left their posts.

• Australian Symantec execs depart

  Symantec’s Australian operation has been hit by the sudden exit of its two most senior executives, Pacific region vice president David Sykes and Asia-Pacific and Japan vice president for channels John Donovan.

• Local datacentres under pressure: more work, but less money

  Symantec’s first “State of the Datacentre” report, published last week, highlights the ICT pressure-points facing datacentres.

• Buy for Symantec

  Symantec is believed to be planning to acquire Vontu, one the largest remaining independent providers of DLP (data leakage prevention) software.

• Unified strategy key to managing IT complexity

  “Unified” thinking about security and storage management is needed if modern datacentres are to run efficiently, says Kris Hagerman, Symantec’s group president for datacentre management.

• Symantec becomes a United supporter

  As part of a move into datacentre management, anti-virus company Symantec has introduced a new software category, Storage United, which the company claims will simplify storage management. Storage United is designed to smooth over the differences in the total storage overhead of a mixed network, improve storage efficiency and generate storage reports that communicate with business users in their own terms.

• Symantec releases down-sized protection

  Symantec has boosted its endpoint protection products with the local launch of a public beta of Endpoint Protection 11.0, code-named Hamlet, and Network Access Control 11.0.
  The products consolidate five technologies — antivirus, antispyware, firewall, host- and network-based intrusion prevention solutions, and application and device control — into a single agent, says Rob Pregnell, Symantec's product marketing manager for client and host security. Network Access Control (NAC) is an optional module that can be added on to Endpoint Protection.
  The package is 84% smaller than Symantec Antivirus, Pregnell says. The company managed to shrink it by eliminating the overhead of the management layers.
  “But it is also fair to say that Symantec needed to boil down its core antivirus and antispyware products, and our developers have been working rigorously for a long time just to do that,” he says. “So, the memory footprint is 21MB for the protection piece, and 25MB in all, including the management.”
  Pregenell says the launch is a significant release for Symantec and much bigger than a version upgrade.
  Endpoint Protection includes technologies that automatically analyse application behaviours and network communications to detect and block attacks.
  Signature-based antivirus protection is not dead, but you need to do more to stay protected today, says Pregnell.
  Attackers today are “collectively, and intelligently” constructing their threats so that they are essentially launching denial of service attacks against research labs and antivirus vendors, he says.
  “Researchers just can’t cut out the signatures fast enough,” he says. “Antivirus is effective, but it’s not the only security mechanism you should be relying on. It’s really becoming second line of defence.”
  Zero-day threats also undermine the logic of an antivirus-based defence mechanism, he says. In 2006, there was a 12-fold increase in zero-day threats, according to Symantec’s internet security threat report, Pregnell says.

• BlackBerry rumours: HP to buy Symantec?

  I just got a mysterious one-line BlackBerry message from a well-placed tech-industry figure. It was a single, terse question in the subject line, no body: “Do you think HP will make a play for Symantec? ... I do.”

• Hackers selling IDs for US$14, Symantec says

  Identity thieves are offering a person's credit-card number, date of birth and other sensitive information for as little as US$14 over the internet, says a new report on online threats released this week.

• Symantec confirms talks with Kiwi mail-scrubber SMX

  Security software giant Symantec is holding talks with Kiwi secure email software developer SMX.

• ERP rollout weighs Symantec down

  Symantec continues to try to work through a challenging rollout of Oracle’s ERP applications that has started to affect its bottom line.

• Symantec to buy Altiris

  Symantec will acquire Altiris, a maker of asset management software for mobile devices and other hardware, for US$830 million (NZ$1.2 billion), say the companies.

• Security company raises risk level of "Storm Worm"

  Symantec Security Response has raised the risk level of Trojan.Peacomm, also referred to as “Storm Worm”, to a category 3 threat, says the company.

• Piracy slows down Veritas upgrade

  Symantec launched a new online software licensing programme on November 6, about the same time it unveiled Veritas Backup Exec 11d. Users are complaining that they have to wait for Backup Exec upgrade notices because of a backlog of people trying to register on the new licensing site.