Norton Personal Firewall, developed by
Symantec, is a discontinued
personal firewall
A personal firewall is an application which controls network traffic to and from a computer, permitting or denying communications based on a security policy. Typically it works as an application layer firewall.
A personal firewall differs from ...
with
ad blocking
Ad blocking or ad filtering is a software capability for blocking or altering online advertising in a web browser, an application or a network. This may be done using browser extensions or other methods.
Technologies and native countermeasures
...
, program control and privacy protection capabilities.
Norton Personal Firewall program control module is able to allow or deny individual applications access to the Internet. Programs are automatically allowed or denied Internet access by Norton Personal Firewall. It uses a
blacklist
Blacklisting is the action of a group or authority compiling a blacklist (or black list) of people, countries or other entities to be avoided or distrusted as being deemed unacceptable to those making the list. If someone is on a blacklist, t ...
and a
whitelist
A whitelist, allowlist, or passlist is a mechanism which explicitly allows some identified entities to access a particular privilege, service, mobility, or recognition i.e. it is a list of things allowed when everything is denied by default. It is ...
to determine whether the program should be allowed Internet access.
The advertisement-blocking feature of this software rewrites the
HTML
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...
that one's browser uses to display
Web pages. It searches for code related to advertisements against a blacklist and prevents the web page from being displayed.
The Privacy Control component blocks
browser cookies
HTTP cookies (also called web cookies, Internet cookies, browser cookies, or simply cookies) are small blocks of data created by a web server while a user is browsing a website and placed on the user's computer or other device by the user's ...
and active content, and prevents the transmission of sensitive data through standard
POP3
In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. POP version 3 (POP3) is the version in common use, and along with IMAP the most common p ...
e-mail clients,
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketin ...
e-mail attachments and
Instant Messaging
Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and trigge ...
services such as
MSN Messenger
MSN Messenger (also known colloquially simply as "Messenger"), later rebranded as Windows Live Messenger, was a cross-platform instant messaging client, instant-messaging client developed by Microsoft. It connected to the Microsoft Messenger ser ...
,
Windows Messenger
Windows Messenger is a discontinued instant messaging client included in Windows XP. Designed for use by both corporate and home users, it was originally created, in 2001, as a streamlined and integrated version of MSN Messenger. It was upgrade ...
and
AOL Instant Messenger
AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) was an instant messaging and presence computer program created by AOL, which used the proprietary OSCAR instant messaging protocol and the TOC protocol to allow registered users to communicate in real time.
AIM w ...
without the user's consent.
See also
*
Internet Security
Internet security is a branch of computer security. It encompasses the Internet, browser security, web site security, and network security as it applies to other applications or operating systems as a whole. Its objective is to establish rules a ...
*
Comparison of antivirus software
This article compares notable antivirus products and services. It is Wikipedia list article rather than a deep analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of each.
Legend
The term "on-demand scan" refers to the possibility of performing a manual ...
*
Comparison of firewalls
Comparison or comparing is the act of evaluating two or more things by determining the relevant, comparable characteristics of each thing, and then determining which characteristics of each are similar to the other, which are different, and t ...
References
{{Firewall software
Firewall software
Personal Firewall
A personal firewall is an application which controls network traffic to and from a computer, permitting or denying communications based on a security policy. Typically it works as an application layer firewall.
A personal firewall differs from ...
Gen Digital software
Proprietary software