Symantec launched the first Norton antivirus utility in 1991, and Norton has been a Symantec brand ever since.
Until now.
The company recently sold its Symantec name and enterprise business to Broadcom.
The new company name is NortonLifeLock (no, really!), but the consumer product line remains the same.
Norton AntiVirus Plus, as the name implies, is antivirus protection plus a lot more.
Among other things, it includes a full-blown firewall, hosted online backup, and spam filtering.
The current edition adds online banking protection, script control, Wi-Fi security, and more.
It's an effective antivirus, but its pricing is impractical, as I'll explain.
Most users who want Norton protection should opt for one of the Norton 360 suite products.
At $59.99 per year for a single license, Norton is expensive.
The most common price point for standalone antivirus products is just under $40.
More than a dozen of the products I've reviewed hit this price point— among them Bitdefender, Trend Micro, and Webroot—and many offer three licenses for $59.99.
McAfee AntiVirus Plus nominally costs the same as Norton, but that price lets you install protection on every device in your household, running Windows, macOS, Android, or iOS.
In addition, Norton doesn't offer multi-license pricing.
If you want to protect two PCs, you buy two individual licenses or, more likely, upgrade to Norton 360 Deluxe, which costs less for five licenses than you'd pay for two individual antivirus licenses.
Trend Micro operates in a similar fashion.
You can buy a single antivirus license to protect one PC or Mac, or upgrade to Trend Micro Internet Security for three licenses that cover either platform.
I should point out that you can also use your single license to install protection on a Mac.
However, the same situation applies, in that two licenses cost more than a five-license subscription to Norton 360 Deluxe (for Mac).
Norton 360 also gives you five licenses for Norton Secure VPN.
In fact, the presence of the VPN is the only difference feature-wise between the two macOS products.
This product replaced Norton Antivirus Basic, and it's an improvement in several ways.
The previous product came with strong limitations on tech support.
All it offered was a built-in diagnostic system and limited support via online forums, with the company's Virus Protection Promise notably absent.
Norton Antivirus Plus gives you full tech support, along with that promise.
If Norton can't remove a malware infestation even after you follow all recommended steps, experts will log into your computer remotely and fix the problem.
In the unlikely event they can't sort things out, you can apply for a refund.
This promise does require a commitment on your part; it only applies if you've signed up for automatic renewal.
All current Norton security products, including this one, come with online backup.
With the standalone antivirus, you just get 2GB of online storage, but that may be enough to securely back up your most important files.
Some of the new features described in this review are still being rolled out slowly.
These include Online Banking Protection, Data Protector, Script Control, and Wi-Fi Security Detections.
My own test system didn't get Data Protector initially; I had to jump through hoops to test that feature.
If you don't see all of these in your own Norton installation, just give it a little time.
My Norton
The current product line emphasizes the My Norton app, which helps you access all the elements of your Norton protection.
An outdoor scene at left softens the view, much like the outdoor background in Panda Dome Essential and the rest of the current Panda product line.
For this basic antivirus, there are just three items listed: Device Security, Cloud Backup, and Password Manager.
Clicking Device Security opens the familiar Norton antivirus interface.
I'll cover the other two components below.
The local antivirus hasn't changed much.
The main window is mostly white, with text and icons in green and black.
Big panels show your status in five areas: Security, Internet Security, Backup, Performance, and More Norton.
Rather than opening a new page, clicking one of these slides the panels down to reveal options for the clicked panel.
For example, clicking Security displays icons for Scans, Live Update, History, and Advanced.
After installation, be sure to run a Live Update.
Even though the status panel indicated my protection updates were current, the Live Update found and installed some updates.
You should also launch each of the browsers that you use and at least install the Norton Toolbar.
You can also add other extensions: Norton Safe Search, which marks dangerous search results; Norton Home Page, which puts Safe Search and a collection of quick links on your home page; and the Norton Password Manager.
Plenty of Scan Choices
When you click the big Security panel and then click Scan, Norton offers the expected Quick, Full, and Custom scans choices, plus a lot more.
For starters, if you think you may have malware even after a scan, you can launch a fresh scan with the aggressive Norton Power Eraser tool.
There's a link in the final report screen for each regular scan that links to Power Eraser; click it if you suspect the cleanup wasn't complete.
On my standard clean test system, a full scan took an hour and 25 minutes, a little longer than the current average of an hour and 8 minutes.
That slightly longer time isn't a big worry, as you only need a full scan right after installation, to root out any preexisting conditions.
The Norton Insight scan checks all your files and identifies those that are known and trusted and therefore don't need to be included in the antivirus scan.
That scan ran in seconds on my test system and flagged 93 percent of the files as trusted.
A subsequent full scan finished in 22 minutes, thanks to the Insight scan.
That's better, of course, but repeat scans with other products that optimize after the first scan have finished even more quickly.
ESET NOD32 Antivirus finished a repeat scan in about seven minutes, and Kaspersky took less than five minutes.
If you run into any trouble at all with Norton, the Diagnostic Report scan may help you solve the problem.
Even if it doesn't, the details from the report should help when you contact tech support about the difficulty.
Excellent Lab Test Results
Sure, your antivirus claims it will protect you, but how do you know it works? One way to verify that claim is by checking results from independent labs around the world, labs whose research experts do nothing but test and evaluate security programs.
The labs choose the products they think are significant, and the security companies decide whether it's worthwhile to pay the testing fee, so when a product appears in reported results, you know it's significant.
All four of the labs I follow report on Norton, a clear indicator of its importance.
Testing experts at SE Labs capture real-world malicious websites and use a replay technique to hit each of the selected antivirus products with precisely the same attack.
Though it's a labor-intensive process, recent tests have included more products than in the past.
The lab offers certification at five levels: AAA, AA, A, B, and C.
Like almost two-thirds of the products in the latest test by SE Labs, Norton received AAA certification.
ESET, Kaspersky, and Microsoft Windows Defender Security Center were among the others that achieved AAA certification.
Where most of the labs report rating levels or numeric scores, London-based MRG-Effitas uses something closer to a pass/fail system.
Unless a product exhibits near-perfect protection, it simply fails.
I follow two tests from this lab, one specific to banking Trojans and one covering a wide variety of malware types.
Like just over half of tested products, Norton passed the banking Trojans test.
Avira Antivirus Pro, Bitdefender, ESET, and Kaspersky also passed.
In the full-spectrum malware protection test, Norton earned Level 1 certification, meaning that it completely fended off all malware attacks used in the test.
Three-quarters of tested products, among them Kaspersky and Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, reached this level; the rest failed.
Researchers at AV-Test Institute look at antivirus products from three different angles.
Naturally, they rate the product's essential ability to protect against malware attack.
But they also rate each product's effect on system performance, and they examine how successfully it avoids naming valid programs or websites as malicious (false positives).
Products can earn six points for each of these criteria, for a maximum of 18 possible points.
Along with Kaspersky and McAfee, Norton earned a perfect 18 points in the most recent test.
Any product that manages at least 17.5 points gets the designation Top Product.
Among the products that reached 17.5 were Microsoft, F-Secure Anti-Virus, and Trend Micro.
Lab Test Results Chart
A product that passes one of the many tests performed by the AV-Comparatives team receives Standard certification.
Those that do better than the basics, or much better, can receive Advanced or Advanced+ certification.
Norton participates in three of the four tests from this lab that I follow; it received one Advanced certification and two Advanced+.
In the latest round of reporting, only Bitdefender and Avira took Advanced+ in all four tests.
Avast Free Antivirus managed three Advanced+ and one Advanced.
With all the different scoring systems, it's hard to get an overall feel for a product's lab results.
I've devised an algorithm that maps all the results onto a 10-point scale and combines them to yield an aggregate score.
Norton's aggregate score of 9.8 points is among the best.
Of products tested by all four labs, only Avira, with 9.9 points, has done better.
Due to the latest lab results, Kaspersky dropped slightly into third place, with 9.7 points.
Bitdefender also scored 9.9, but with results from just three labs.
Tested by two of the four labs, Sophos Home Premium aced both tests for a perfect 10.
Very Good Malware Protection
Even when the labs offer positive and plentiful results, I still like to get a feel for each product's malware protection skills using my own hands-on tests.
My basic malware protection test starts when I open a folder containing a collection of samples that I collected and analyzed myself.
Like most competing products, Norton started examining these samples right away.
Rather than frantically popping up a separate notification for each detection, it simply displayed a notification that the Auto-Protect component was busy processing threats.
Some detected samples remained visible in Windows Explorer, but with a size of zero bytes.
I verified that these files were effectively gone, though I couldn't delete them to finish the cleanup.
A reboot removed those traces.
In all, Norton eliminated 70 percent of the samples in this initial culling.
Norton caught most of the remaining samples when I launched them, in most cases eliminating the file so quickly that Windows was left displaying an error message.
It did miss a few less-risky items, so-called Potentially Unwanted Programs.
In the end, it detected 91 percent of the samples and scored 9.0 of 10 possible points.
That's just a middling score, but when the labs praise a program to the skies, I give their findings more weight than my own tests.
Three programs have earned an impressive 9.8 points against this current sample set, Malwarebytes Premium, Sophos, and Windows Defender.
Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus detected more samples, 100 percent of them, but a few tiny flaws in its protection brought it in with 9.7 points.
I maintain a second set of samples, copies of the main collection that I've modified by hand, so they don't match too-strict signature-based detection systems.
I change each filename, tack zeroes onto the end to change the apparent size, and replace some non-executable bytes within the file.
Norton wiped out most of these, leaving more of those zero-byte remnants that vanished on reboot.
Malware Protection Results Chart
Those hand-analyzed samples from my malware collection necessarily stay the same for quite a while, because it takes me weeks to prepare a new set.
For a view on how each antivirus handles the most current malware, I start with a feed of recent malware-hosting URLs supplied by testing lab MRG-Effitas.
Even though the URLs are no more than a few days old, I usually find that quite a few have gone dark since discovery.
For those that still work, I note whether the antivirus prevents the browser from visiting the dangerous page, wipes out the malware payload, or does nothing at all.
In summing up the results, I give equal credit for URL-blocking and for download-deletion.
Norton blocked some URLs by replacing the browser page with a big, red warning.
It blocked others in a way that left the browser displaying an error, with a popup to explain what happened.
When the browser protection didn't prevent all access, the Download Insight component vetted every download.
In some cases, it reported the file as dangerous before I even clicked save.
For others, it continued analysis after the download finished, announcing its verdict 10-15 seconds later.
In a very few cases, it reported a safe download.
Like Windows Defender, Norton blocked 97 percent of the malware payloads from reaching the test system.
That's quite good, but not the very best score in this test.
Trend Micro scored 99 percent, while McAfee, Sophos, and Vipre Antivirus Plus came out at the top with 100 percent.
Still, Norton is clearly in the winner's circle.
The current edition adds a new feature called Script Control.
I couldn't test it directly, but it seems straightforward.
Many attacks by ransomware and other malware enter the system through tainted PDFs and Office documents.
Script Control strips out scripts from downloaded documents, and blocks scripts from running when you open documents.
Phishing Protection Success
Writing a malicious program that can steal personal data without triggering antivirus defenses is complicated.
Creating a website that looks like Capitol One or some other bank and hoovering up the login credentials of hapless netizens who don't notice the chicanery is simple.
Phishing fraudsters put up fake versions of financial sites, online games, even dating sites, capturing as many passwords as they can before the site...
