Does Norton work well on apple devices?

Perhaps some constructive context would be worthwhile...

A VPN connection can only protect traffic between the VPN Client and the VPN Gateway. If you are running your own Gateway, while the VPN is active (and a no-split-tunnel traffic policy is applied) all traffic to your Gateway will have protection of the VPN tunnel between these two endpoints.

If instead you are connecting to a commercial VPN Service, your VPN traffic will be protected as far as your VPN Provider's Gateway - where it will be delivered to (and traverse) the internet without benefit of the VPN. As such, when connecting to an untrusted public WiFi, all of your network traffic will be protected over the least-trustworthy public WiFi connection - but receive no additional protection from where your traffic exits the VPN at the Gateway.

It is when using untrusted WiFi networks that Commercial VPN Apps may have some useful utility - but you must consider that your unencrypted data remains visible to the VPN Provider. Choose your Provider with care - as not all are themselves trustworthy. That said, from a privacy perspective, the information that you expose to the VPN provider is no more than you already expose to your ISP.

Also consider that much of your network traffic is already encrypted, by default, using TLS/SSL. That said, there are some network protocols (such as DNS) that do not have benefit of encryption - and this traffic can be intercepted or maliciously manipulated. This risk can be mitigated using DoH, DoT or ODoH protocols.

DoH and DoT are natively supported by iOS/iPadOS, but are not exposed via iPad settings; to configure and use these protocols you will need to use a third-party App - such as DNSecure. ODoH is also natively supported - but is only available to iCloud+ subscribers using Apple's Private Relay function.

Returning to your specific question, for Norton and similar products, the entire security product suite has limited if any benefit when used with iOS/iPadOS. There are no true Antivirus Products available for iOS/iPadOS. Those that claim to provide AV protection are little more than “snake oil”, have negligible (if any benefit) and for Apple devices should generally be avoided. Very often, Apps of this nature introduce more issues than added benefit.

Unlike traditional Operating Systems with which you may be familiar, iOS/iPadOS uses a sandboxed security architecture. As such, Apps cannot access any data outside of their own sandbox - and cannot access the storage and resources of other Apps. As such, it is impossible for an Anti-Virus App to scan the filesystem.

For iOS/iPadOS, the Norton 360 App employs a potentially dubious network proxy - that attempts to intercept and examine network traffic.

There are useful security enhancements and threat mitigations that can add security to your device - such:

• adding a good content/ad-blocking product (e.g., 1Blocker)
• use a security-focused DNS provider (e.g., Quad9)
• use encrypted DNS transport protocols (DoH, oDoH, DoT)(e.g., Apple Private Relay).

buabua wrote:

Does Norton work well on apple devices?

I second Kurt Lang. I would never put anything from Norton on my Apple devices.

I wouldn't touch anything from Norton/Symantec.

And VPNs are essentially useless when trying to use them as a security add-on. That's not what VPNs are for.

Read on for more about VPNs.

Public VPN's are anything but private.

A VPN can do absolutely nothing to hide any data going between you and the site you're viewing since only half of the communication is encrypted. Anything going to the site from the VPN and back to it is in the clear, or the site you're accessing would have no idea what to do with the encrypted data.

A VPN has only two uses:

1. You're using it to send and receive content from a truly tunneled VPN at your place of employment. Only the servers at the office get the unencrypted data from you as output from the VPN. Anything coming back to you is encrypted. Meaning, anyone trying to capture data between you and the office will only ever see encrypted data. A hacker would have to somehow breach the business' server on the clear input/output side, or your end to get anything.

2. You're trying to hide yourself. Since a VPN encrypts what's coming back to you, it does a good job at hiding what IP address the data is going back to (and as the link mentions, even this doesn't do a good job of hiding you anymore). However, any and all VPN's log this data. If you do anything illegal and law enforcement tracks the clear data back to the VPN (and they can), they'll demand log data to see what IP address the data was output to. The site running the VPN will give you up. They aren't going to go to jail for what you do.

Free VPNs sell your data.  (just one of many sites explaining this)

This isn't exactly breaking news. It's been known for a very long time that free VPN's (in particular) log and sell your data. How else do you think they pay for their servers?

It's the same model as Google, and in particular, Chrome. You are the product. Chrome runs a background daemon from the moment you turn your computer on, whether Chrome itself is running or not. Its job is to constantly send anonymized data back to Google about your web and personal computer usage.

But it's still mostly useless. No matter what web site you're communicating with, only what you send to the VPN and it sends back to you is encrypted. Every bit of data out of the VPN to the site you're visiting, and from there back to the VPN is the same as using no VPN at all. It has to be, or the sites you're visiting would just get a load of encrypted data they can't do anything with. NordVPN has also recently been sued for deceptive practices by making it nearly impossible to unsubscribe

VPN reviews you find online are also almost completely untrustworthy:

Former Malware Distributor Kape Technologies Now Owns ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, Zenmate, and a Collection of VPN “Review” Websites