Norton Antivirus Review

Our User Experience

Deciding on a Norton product is the crucial first step, and it also happens to be the most tedious. Norton offers a lot of products, from antivirus software to a VPN and password manager. And often, you’ll find those products bundled together. Thankfully, it gets easier once you’re over the hurdle of choosing a package.

If you’re looking for antivirus protection, we recommend starting with the AntiVirus Plus subscriptions, the most basic antivirus package from Norton. It’s basic in the sense that it doesn’t offer much extras, unlike the Norton 360 packages that include the Norton Secure VPN among other products. However, when it comes to malware detection and protection, the AntiVirus Plus subscription is just as good as any Norton antivirus.

Since our goal in the first place is to see how well Norton’s antivirus works, we purchased the AntiVirus Plus plan.

To buy an AntiVirus Plus subscription, we signed up for an account first and then bought a license once we were logged in. It was pretty straightforward; we entered our payment information, checked-out, and within seconds, we had bought ourselves antivirus software.

Next, we downloaded the software and installed it. The installation process took longer than we expected, and we even had to restart our device after the installation, but that’s normal for antivirus software. Just a reminder to save everything you’re working on before the installation.

Oddly, once the app was installed, it said we were in a trial for 30 days, which shouldn’t be the case because we had already bought a subscription. We had to sign in first, apparently, but the sign-in page didn’t show up the first time we opened the app. And that had been the theme throughout our entire testing process: Norton’s antivirus software is well-built, but the user-experience could be improved. Overall, though, Norton was easy to use.

The Options From Norton

Let’s backtrack a little and talk about your options from Norton. Basically, there are three types of antivirus subscriptions.

The first one is a barebones subscription with just antivirus protection and a few helpful extras like a password manager, a smart firewall, and cloud backup. Subscriptions under this tier are called Antivirus Plus.

Next, we have Norton 360, which is Norton’s all-around digital security suite that includes everything in Antivirus Plus and additional tools like a VPN, parental-control software, and a privacy monitor.

Lastly, thanks to a merger with LifeLock, Norton 360 with LifeLock subscriptions offer traditional identity monitoring service on top of all Norton 360 features. You can learn more about LifeLock in our LifeLock review.

Since we wanted to focus our testing on the antivirus software, we took advantage of the low introductory price of the Norton Antivirus Plus subscription. But overall, if you’re looking for total digital protection, Norton 360 is the best way to go.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about what we got from Norton Antivirus Plus, starting with device security.

Device Security

This section of the app contained the meat of the antivirus software – malware detection. More specifically, this was where we initiated our malware scans.

Norton gave us three options:

• Quick Scan: The Quick Scan option scanned our entire computer, but focused mainly on areas where malware was most likely to hide. That included key registries and processes running in the background. It’s used for regular maintenance, ideally once a week.
• Full Scan: As opposed to Quick Scans, Full Scans looked at every single file. They understandably took longer – sometimes up to 30 minutes. We recommend doing a full scan at least once a month.
• File Scan: Lastly, the File Scan option scanned only the files we specified. We recommend doing a File Scan whenever you download or receive a file from an unknown or unverified source.

So what exactly is Norton scanning for, anyway? Well, any kind of threat that is in Norton’s malware database. That includes all known trojan viruses, computer worms, ransomware, adware, and even bloatware. It doesn’t pick and choose; it looks for anything that might be harmful to your devices.

Now, let’s get a little bit technical. When Norton scans computers, it uses two types of detection: signature-based and behavior-based.

Signature-based detection is the old-school way of detecting malware. Norton compares every file against its malware database, and if a file contains malware signatures — basically, malicious codes included in the malware database — Norton flags it down. Think of it like a cop pulling over a car that matches the description and plate of a getaway vehicle.

The second type of detection, behavior-based, is more advanced because it can detect malware even if it’s not in a database. This is effective in stopping newly developed malware as well as zero-day attacks. To detect malware based on behavior, Norton looks at how each file and process behaves, and flags suspicious behavior like if a file copies itself to different folders without permission from the user.

Back to the cops analogy, behavior-based detection is like pulling over a car because of behavior such as speeding or swerving before it causes damage.

Password Manager

Now, part of our antivirus subscription was also a password manager, but when we clicked “Set Up” on the Norton app, we were brought back to the Norton website and told to install a separate browser extension or mobile app. We downloaded the extension for Chrome within a few seconds and were brought to another web page, where we entered our email address. After signing in to our account on Norton’s website, we were brought to a page that said to create a vault. Next, we were told to create a vault password and were brought to a page to set up the password manager on our phones, which we decided to skip for now. The process was a bit tedious, but it’s worth it considering that Norton’s password vault is encrypted, unlike Chrome’s password storage that isn’t.

Finally, we were in the vault, where we could either manually add our login information or import our passwords from Firefox. The problem? We saved our passwords in Chrome, but they didn’t accept the CSV file that we already had on our computer. Rather, we had to download the importer app, extract our passwords from Chrome, convert them from CSV to JSON, and then drag that file into Norton’s vault. If this sounds complicated, it’s because it was. But after about three tries, we finally got it right and were able to drop our file in the vault. Now, when we go to websites where we already have accounts, Norton fills it in for us, which is very convenient despite the really disorderly setup process.

That was it for the Norton Antivirus Plus macOS app, except for one thing: at the bottom of the app, it said Additional Apps & Services. Curious, we clicked on it and found a description of the Ultimate Help Desk, which was basically an IT service for around $20 a month where we could get help “on-demand”. To be honest, we assumed that this was already available on a free level, so needless to say, we did not sign up.

Cloud Backup

So aside from the antivirus itself and the password manager, there’s another feature included in our Norton AntiVirus Plus subscription. We forgot about this one, actually, until it appeared later in our testing. Basically, Norton gave us a two GB cloud backup, which we were able to access from the online dashboard.

On the cloud backup section of the dashboard, we were able to drag and drop files from our computer, kind of like Google Drive. The difference is that it’s encrypted, so we can be sure that no one but us has access to the files.

The cloud backup may seem like a weird addition to Norton’s features, but in fact, it’s a very effective measure to protect important files from ransomware. Cybercriminals carry out ransomware attacks by locking users out of their local files, usually through encryption, and then asking for ransom in exchange for the files. If you have backup of your most important files on the cloud, you can recover them anytime without paying a ransom. That’s a nice feature to cap off our review of Norton’s features.

Testing Norton Antivirus Plus

According to AV-Test, an independent antivirus testing lab, Norton’s record of detecting 100 percent of widespread malware tracks back to May 2020. Compared to the industry average of 99 percent, still impressive, Norton is a cut above the rest.

But we don’t just go by other people’s test results. We also performed our own tests on Norton after downloading five different types of viruses disguised as different types of files: XLSX, EXE, DOC, XLSM and SLX files. With Norton on, the software detected three out of the five, leaving the DOC and XLSM files undetected. That would have been a problem had we clicked on them; the DOC app would’ve taken over our Mac as an administrator, while the XLSM file would have exploited our documents. Even though 60 percent is technically a failing grade if you’re in school, only five percent of the 40 software we tested detected 100 percent of those same five viruses, so when you look at it that way, Norton is actually pretty on-par with its competition for virus detection.

Paying for Norton Antivirus Plus

Norton is a big-name brand antivirus with a rich feature-set and satisfactory malware detection capabilities, so it must be expensive, right? Well, we paid only $19.99 for the first year of our Norton Antivirus Plus subscription. This is a really low price compared to other antivirus programs, most of which cost around $39.99 per year. But again, since this price only applies to the first year, we can’t say for sure if Norton will save you money over time. We cover all of their subscription options on our Norton pricing page, for more information.

The Norton Mobile Applications

Even though we tested out Norton on our trusty old Macbook Pro, we also wanted to see what customers thought of its iOS and Android apps, both of which have ratings of 4.7 out of five stars on the App and Google Play stores, respectively. And while there were some negative recent comments regarding auto-renewal for subscriptions, in general, the apps worked well for people and were certainly easier to install than the desktop app. Hallelujah!

Can I Trust Norton?

Since we can’t do any team-building activities with Antivirus Plus like a trust fall, we had to land on other ways to see how trustworthy it is. We started with their privacy policy, plain and simple.

Privacy Policy

After a little bit of digging, we found the privacy policy for Norton’s antivirus products, specifically. They keep data such as:

• Any spam emails
• Reported malware detections
• File backups if using cloud storage
• Anonymized IP address
• Anonymized geolocation
• Product serial number
• Operating system
• Device make and model
• Device identifiers
• Websites visited including keywords and search terms
• Application names and versions
• Internet usage time
• Connection activity.

Norton also collects and accesses some of our data through third parties, gathering information like the security ratings of our URLs and files, the files that the software identified as malware plus any failure diagnostics. However, Norton restricts this third-party sharing to only auditors related to the government, service providers or research organizations. Unlike their identity monitoring software LifeLock, which we’ve also reviewed, they don’t share this information with marketers and advertisers, which was a relief. Overall, this privacy policy is actually better than most simply due to the fact that they’re not selling our data to advertisers (with their antivirus software, anyway).

But the privacy policy alone wasn’t enough to sway us one way or another. Norton, owned by Symantec, has a few things in their past that gave us pause.

>> Also see: Bitdefender vs Norton

Software Vulnerabilities

The most concerning thing was the fact that in 2018, Symantec was sued in a class-action lawsuit due to vulnerabilities in their antivirus software1 (and yes, that’s exactly what we’re talking about here). Now, these sorts of vulnerabilities aren’t uncommon among tech companies, but it’s still not great that an antivirus company actually made some of their customers more vulnerable to cyber attacks. That’d be like a doctor causing more harm than good to her patients!

What was the result of the lawsuit, you may be wondering? Well, it’s still ongoing, as of May 2020 when it was officially granted the right to proceed as a class action lawsuit.2 Now, keep in mind that Symantec is innocent until proven guilty, so we are keeping our eyes on this case until it’s resolved.

Scare Tactics

But that wasn’t the only thing giving us pause about Symantec and by extension Norton. Back in 2012, they were sued in another class action lawsuit for allegedly defrauding their customers, running fake antivirus scans on their computers to convince them to buy their software.3 Symantec ended up settling for $11 million.4

Double Billing

The sad part is that this isn’t a full list of all of Symantec’s class action lawsuits. In 2013, they had to pay $10 million for intentionally billing customers twice as much as they should have.5

Now, we’re not legal scholars, but this seems to be far too many class action lawsuits for a company that’s supposed to help to protect people. Our theory? Since Norton is a publicly traded company, they’re subject to the demands of their shareholders, and with some tech companies expanding ten-fold every quarter, the desire to deliver that return on investment may have caused some shady business practices. That being said, this is more of a critique of capitalism than it is of Norton (in other words, don’t hate the player, hate the game). Of course, we completely understand if these lawsuits turn you off of Norton; if that’s the case, we recommend learning more about the other best antivirus software protection available.

Need Help?

When we needed help setting up the password manager component of our antivirus software, we did a search on Norton’s online help center, which quickly brought us instructions. However, we could’ve also taken advantage of their live chat, 24/7 phone support, or even their support staff on Facebook and Twitter. Overall, we’re impressed with their 24/7 support, as most companies just have business hours during the weekdays.