I had Norton Antivirus installed for many years and it was recently upgraded to what looks like Norton 360 as it now has a firewall which it never had before. After this recent upgrade, i have noticed that various parts of Norton such as NortonUI.exe, nllToolsSvc.exe and NortonSvc.exe all connect to different Data centers. One Data Center i have never heard of is in Australia, the other 2 are major Data Centers in the US being Microsoft and Google. Every time Norton updates itself, the executables needing to connect to the internet are also connect to different Data Centers without my permission. I am blocking these connections to the Data centers with a 3rd party firewall that was installed before Norton included a firewall. Does Norton now sell our information to many Data Centers all over the world?? If so i’ll remember this when it comes to renewing my subscription.
@BooBoo02 Norton, as other companies do, have infrastructure that is located in different parts of the globe. Depending on the amount of users traffic and bandwidth functions will connect to the location where the most dependable and quickest service is available. Norton doesn’t need your permissions to do the connections as it is their proprietary property ( Norton software and supporting data centers, etc. ) we use. Norton determines what and where we are connected to.
Another thing to keep in mind, when a company has acquired / purchased other smaller companies they also acquire the assets of that company as well. Such as Norton purchasing Avast and other competitors in the recent past. Those assets are being used for the quality of service to deliver updates as well as cloud threat detections as the Norton products are being used. Hope this helps explain what you are concerned about.
Edited: I would not suggest blocking the Norton connections as it will prevent your Norton product from having the latest detection definitions as well as other functions not to work properly. That of course is ultimately your decision to make based on your needs.
*Please note that - I am NOT a Norton employee, just another experienced user helping others.
SA
Hi,
Thank You for your informative reply to my concern which was mostly based on my ignorance on how the internet has evolved form the times before cloud services and Data Centers. I had a quick search on the internet before seeing your reply on the matter of Data Centers and it has eased my mind somewhat as to their involvement in the way we browse the internet and c onnect to web sites. When i started looking into the ip addresses that Norton (as well as other software i have) connects to, my first thought was that i had some sort of malware that was redirecting my connection to Data Centers that serve no purpose other than to steal your information. Pretty paranoid of me. Correct me if i am wrong. In my breif search for information about Data Centers, am i correct in saying that internet traffic gets directed to certain Data Centers as they also provide cloud protection??
Also you said that Avast has been recently purchased by Norton. This explains why the only information i find on the overseer.exe file that is part of Norton mostly point to sites talking about Avast.
Thanks a lot your help is much appreciated.
Norton™ is part of Gen™ - a global company with a family of consumer brands including Norton, Avast, LifeLock, Avira, AVG, ReputationDefender and CCleaner.
You are most welcome, glad to help as always!!
SA