Norton Internet Security 2011 review

Norton Internet Security 2011 is definitely the glossiest of this year's anti-malware suites. The interface's main screen is a snazzy yellow-on-black affair, which displays the status of each of the program's components, along with a map showing the density of malware threats around the world. The latter is entirely gratuitous but it's certainly pretty. However, no one should buy security software because it looks nice.

Fortunately, Norton comes with a huge array of features to go with its attractive front end. The usual protective modules are all present and accounted for, with a firewall, spam filtering and email scanning that have seen no significant upgrades since the 2010 edition - not that any were required.

Symantec also provides its Safe Web protection tool, which integrates with Firefox and Internet Explorer to block malicious sites. An additional layer of protection is provided by Norton Insight, which gives you reputation-based feedback on whether or not a file is safe to download or run, based on the experiences of other Norton users. Other features include a monitoring tool to detect malicious links in instant messages, secure password storage, PC tune-up utilities and parental controls to monitor and restrict your children's browsing, chat and social networking habits.

In the last couple of years, Norton has generally excelled in our malware exposure tests, and this round of testing has been no exception. The program prevented 90 per cent of our test viruses from reaching the hard disk and defended against 100 per cent of threats. It only lost points in our false positive test, marking a popular free software package downloaded from a major site as "unsafe to install". Nonetheless, Norton Internet Security 2011 remains one of the most reliable, feature-packed and easy-to-use options available for defence against internet malware threats.

It's a bit more expensive than some other suites with a similar range of features and this, in combination with its false positive detection, means that this year we're recommending Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security 2011 as a better buy.