Norton Antibot™ Retail Price US$ 29.99 C$ 29.31

Stops and removes malicious bots. Has a layer of security to protect your identity. Works with other security products. Protection for up to 3 PCs per household. Includes protection updates.

Antiviruses are useful tools, and everyone should have them. But right now there are approximately 12 million PCs infected by 'bots'. Bots are pieces of software cobbled together out of various tools, and often slip past virus scanners, either because they are too new or have never been noticed or because they use legit software tied together in various ways. Antivirus software often simply doesn't contain their signatures, so will never detect them.

Enter Norton AntiBot. Norton has a tool that doesn't look for specific software, but instead looks for specific behavior. It watches everything suspicious that software does, and once software behaviors suspiciously enough, a flag is raised and you're informed of it. This is called 'heuristic' detection.

Think of antibot and antivirus as airport security in two parts. AntiVirus is checking passengers' name against a list. AntiBot is behavioural analysis, watching passengers to see if they act suspiciously, and giving them extra attention if so.

And Norton AntiBot doesn't require Norton AntiVirus, it complements any virus scanner.

What sort of behavior is 'suspicious' for software? Unlike viruses, bot have a purpose for others besides simply being harmful, and this always require certain network behaviors.

The first sort of bot is what might be called a 'standalone bot'. This is usually installed purposefully on that computer by someone else, and usually used to steal information from that computer, such as banking information, and send it somewhere else. Norton AntiBot watches for this sort of behavior, making sure that some program didn't just decide to email personal infomation out.

The other kind of bots are 'botnet' bots. These bots are installed using the same security holes viruses do to get in. When they are installed, the software connects to a server and just sits there, waiting instructions. Other bot-infected servers also do so, forming a 'botnet'.Computer criminals can now send instructions to these botnets, to get all the computer to do the same thing.

The major thing these botnets are called on is to send spam. There are vast spamming networks out there with hundreds of thousands of computers. Almost all spam is send using other people's computers illegally, and botnet owners sell access to their botnets for these purposes.

The other thing, less common, is what is known as a 'denial of service' attack, aka a DoS attack. This is when a bunch of computers on the internet start attacking and overloading some other server on the internet.

Most often this is done by various malcontents, but can be part of a 'cyberwar' when countries do it to each other. How would you feel to be an unwilling participate in a cyberwar, in the middle of a fight between two random countries, or, worse, attacking your own country's infrastructure?

Don't take the risk that, right now, your computer is completely 'owned' by someone else who can make it do anything they want, from attacking other people to spamming to just sending a copy of every single file on your comptuer to somewhere else. Don't assume your antivirus would have caught them, so are so legitmate looking and change so fast they'll never find them. And even if you have something that stops personal information from leaving your comptuer, like Norton Confidential, that's not going to stop someone from doing other malicious things with and to your computer. Get Norton AntiBot now.