Among the six protective layers that make up Norton Internet Security antivirus, is the SONAR layer, for its acronym in English of “Symantec Online Network for Advanced Response”, which literally translates as online network for advanced responses from Symantec, the company responsible for Norton antivirus, which is your PC’s firewall.
This layer tends to run constantly in the background, analyzing the behavior of the files or applications that are installed on our computer, looking for any malware, any type of computer virus or behavior that it considers suspicious and warning the user to proceed with its subsequent removal.
However, on occasions, the work carried out may indicate that there is a virus in a folder where we are sure it is impossible for it to be, such as a folder with family photos, or all the documents of our work; this is then referred to as a “false positive” .
Despite this, this does not mean that our antivirus is in bad condition, it simply tends to be suspicious of those whose termination is, for example, file.txt, file.dbf, file.log, or file.hlp or another extension of file because that is, literally, its main function within the layers that make up the antivirus.
Norton Internet Security can also indicate that a file or program created by the main user of the computer is malicious, but this because it is not a known developer that is in its database, so the chances that it really is a malware are minimal.
Due to this, the antivirus itself has the option of creating an exclusion list that you can modify manually, that is, the opposite of a black list of files , folders or websites that you visit frequently, and of which you are sure that they are safe, since by including them you will decrease the level of protection.
Steps to take to permanently exclude files from scanning
The first thing you should do is go to start, and look in the menu for the Norton Internet Security icon , click on it and start running it, then you should go to “Settings” and in that tab, select “Antivirus”, which It will display a series of options; you click on Analysis and Risks.
A new window will open here, where you will see the option to select “Exceptions / Low risk section”, click on it then “Settings”, which will show you an option to “Exclude items from the scan”, then you will see the option Click on “Add”, and now you can select folders or files.
By doing this, you can select entire folders and also subfolders, although it is not a recommended process for those that are constantly being updated, such as “Downloads” , since generally Internet files may be accompanied by some malware.
Click on “browse” , select multiple files or folders that you are sure are not infected and then “ok”. These files will be added to the exclusion section, you apply the changes, and click “ok”, in this way they will be permanently excluded from Norton’s analysis.
Self-protection exclusion and intelligent discharge detection
Norton has the ability to also make scan exclusions in smart download detection, where the ” Real-time Exclusion ” window will open and you click Add. In this way, you repeat the steps previously explained, select the folders or files> examine> “Ok”> Apply> ok.
Once you have carried out these steps and excluded the files and folders that you consider safe, Norton will ignore them when it performs its corresponding analysis in search of files that could put the security of the computer at risk, for which we reiterate that you have full confidence that said files are not infected.
Taking into account the possibility of false positives, you should always keep your antivirus with the latest updates, running ” LiveUpdate ” to find the most recent and corrected version of Norton. If there are still false positives even having the latest versions, you must make a report in ” NortonLifeLock ” to report it.
