Symantec Norton Confidential review

If you've been reading the papers, you'll be familiar with the threat posed by phishing websites. These try to fool you into entering your personal details into fake financial and shopping websites.

To protect us from this menace, Symantec has released Norton Confidential. The program consists of three elements: Infovault, which stores website login details; a phishing filter that scans sites and tells you whether it thinks they're trustworthy; and a malware scanner that checks for programs attempting to harvest your personal data.

Every time you login to a website, Infovault offers to save your password and username. If you try and use the login details with a website that the program doesn't recognise, a warning is displayed. Theoretically, this should prevent you giving personal details to phishing websites. Infovault can also be configured so that anyone who tries to log in to a specific site must first log in to Norton Confidential. This all sounds fine, but it only works with Internet Explorer - users of Firefox and Opera browsers are left unprotected. This produces the odd situation in which you can only enjoy the 'extra' security offered by this program by using what is currently the least secure browser. It also allows anyone who knows, or can guess, your login details to bypass Norton Confidential simply by using an alternative browser.

We tried the phishing filter on several phishing sites - it didn't flag up anything suspicious about any of them. The malware scanner misidentified a component of our anti-virus software, made by one of Symantec's competitors, as a keylogger.

This is a pointless program. Good anti-virus software will protect your PC against malware, as will the free-to-download Microsoft Windows Defender. Current browsers already contain anti-phishing features, and a little common sense will keep your passwords safe.