Norton Product Tamper Protection - Constantly, consistently, 24/7, blocking any and all activity, communication, everything from Windows Defender. No other anti-virus/internet security product that I've used has had this much trouble with Defender. You might get a log entry every hour or so, but nothing compares to the volume of reports Norton is generating every single second of the day. Also, Norton appears to completely distrust anything that WMI attempts to do. Looking at the logs, Norton does not like anything that WMI tries to do. The Office 365 Installer (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\ClickToRun\OfficeClickToRun.exe) has become a mortal danger (/s). Whatever Norton thought the program was up to, it blocked all activities, hundreds of times this last month.
Download Insight - In the last month, Norton has identified six dire threats to my system that it just erased. In every case, I pulled the file Norton erased from a backup and ran it through several virus/malware scanners. The files are clean. Is Norton even looking at the files in question, or going of incorrect data that says that this file, with this name, is an "Extreme Threat". And the things that Norton is coming up with, the justification for the erasure, is a bit hard to believe - I honestly think the heuristic detection system is utterly untrustworthy. I had days where nothing I downloaded, sometimes several dozen programs, escaped unchallenged.
Intrusion Prevention - Multiple attempts to remotely hack my network. This one I'm a bit more understanding of, and tend to believe Norton. I know from monitoring corporate firewall appliances that it's not uncommon for a company to get port scans/intrusion attempts dozens or hundreds of times a day.
Firewall Activities - Erroneously blocking DHCP traffic from the router. Erroneously blocking any and all traffic from my new NAS, silently, in the background, no warning or error. Every 3 seconds it is creating multiple log entries for blocked Windows Networking File Sharing attempts, no warnings, no reports or errors, just blocks any and all attempts to reach out to any of the network available media resources.
Download Insight is probably the experience I have least enjoyed about Norton, this past month. I've been in IT since 1990, Systems/Network admin most of the time, recently more work in cybersecurity than anything else. You have to be able to trust your tools, anti-virus, anti-malware, whatever it is, implicitly. When your internet security software reports that xxxxxx.xxx download is a dire threat, that it's infected with a Trojan the first time, you might be concerned, and double check. Every time I cleared that file by checking it with multiple virus/malware scanners, and told Norton to exclude it, Norton pops up a few seconds later, having already deleted the file I just told it not to touch. Only, this time it's identified a completely different threat, a different species of Trojan.
By the 20'th time that Norton did this, I was at a full boil. I do not have the time to babysit a security product that refuses to behave, that does not listen when configured to ignore that program, and lies about what it's finding... we are paying for a better service than this. If this had only happened with the one program, that I had used for years and knew the developer and completely trusted him, I would have still been angry... but I would not have lost all faith in this feature. I watched the same thing happen with probably 100 or 150 programs/utilities over the last month. Every time I told Norton to ignore the file, Norton detected it as something else and erased it anyway. Completely unacceptable.
ANY help whatsoever would be appreciated :)
Mike Johnson
PS: Take a look at the NortonSecurity.exe crash dialog. This happens sometimes a dozen times a day, and of course since it affects the security of the machine, I need to reboot. Which I hate.