I got an e-mail today with the subject “[my name], your free update to Norton™ AntiVirus is Available.” Inside the e-mail was, along with other text and information, a link to “Update Now.”
I was, in all honesty, about to click the link when that little voice in my head said check the link, which I did. It went to response.nortonfromsymantec.com/servlet/ and a jumble of characters. The sent-from e-mail address was norton at nortonfromsymantec.com. All the text in the footer was convincing, little footnotes, copyright notices, the mailing address for Symantec. But all the links led to the same site, nortonfromsymantec.com.
I’d never heard of nor been contacted before by this site so I looked it up on Yahoo! but didn’t get much in the way of information. I got the Symantec website and bunches of other sites hawking the Norton program download along with registration keys.
Finally I thought to check the Norton support forum to see what others said about it. There’s one topic, “Email from Norton”, where the site is mentioned, and someone from Norton confirmed that it’s a Symantec-owned website, and the e-mail was sent from the company.
But yeesh! Why does Symantec have to do it that way? Anyone who’s savvy enough will question an e-mail and a website like that! Why can’t they just go through symantec.com or norton.com to offer the upgrade, which is what I ended up doing, because I still don’t fully trust that nortonfromsymantec.com.
Although it is awfully nice of Symantec to offer this upgrade. I bought Norton Anti-Virus 2009, and they offered me a free upgrade to NAV 2011! They just need to rethink the execution of it. After all, I’d bought NAV 2002 and they never offered a free upgrade in all those years.
Ohh? :O How is Norton behaving for you? Almost everything I’ve heard about it has been pretty negative so far and was wondering if you’ve had any problems with it.
It works fine for me. The only time I really had a problem with Norton Anti-Virus was with the 2002 version on my laptop that had only 256–384 MB RAM. D8 When virus scans were running I couldn’t really work on my laptop. Also, the subscription fee for updates and stuff is a bit steep for me, first a student then an unemployed grad.
Other than that, I much prefer it to McAfee, which the last time I used it (2006 I think?) it kept working through Internet Explorer with ActiveX controls. Big no-no for me!! I also didn’t feel McAfee was very good at protecting my computer anyway.
I also use ZoneAlarm Anti-Virus, which is decent. I get upgrades for my program along with virus protection updates. I also like how much I can customize the level of protection (which I keep very high XD;; warning popups galore!). But since I use it on my slow, slow laptop, the updates and virus scans make my laptop really drag. Ugh.
Ohhhh, most interesting o.o