When Symantec released its Norton 2011 products back in September, the company spoke of "engendering goodwill" among potential customers with free tools to educate and protect their vulnerable systems. Today, the company released yet another free tool to keep users aware of the ever-changing daily threat landscape.
With the update of Norton 360 to version 5.0 today, Symantec also unveiled the Norton Cybercrime Index, a free service that gives a daily snapshot of the most dangerous websites and the most hijacked search terms, as well as top scams, identity theft ploys and spam.
The daily data from the Cybercrime Index can be viewed in a Web portal, on a mobile site, or as a free desktop gadget for Windows 7 and Vista. The main tool is a daily risk level meter similar to the Department of Homeland Security's threat advisory level.
Today, for example, is an 82 on the Norton Cybercime index, which falls closer to the historic low of 57. The historic high, by comparison, is 179, which occurred in late December, because of a seasonal increase in identity theft and fraud.
The service includes a daily list the most malware-ridden sites, the top malware vectors, the most hijacked search terms (today's top is "translator") the top spam categories, the volume of spam, categories most subject to fraud and ID theft, and a list of recent incidents of ID theft with detailed descriptions.
The daily risk level is determined by information from Symantec's Global Intelligence Network, which monitors more than 130 million servers and pulls data from ID Analytics and the Open Security Foundation's DataLossDB. All this data is then plugged into an algorithm that assigns values to the number of online threats every day.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010