SONAR is a real-time protection that detects potentially malicious applications when they run on your computers. SONAR provides "zero-day" protection because it detects threats before traditional virus and spyware detection definitions have been created to address the threats.

SONAR uses heuristics as well as reputation data to detect emerging and unknown threats. SONAR provides an additional level of protection on your client computers and complements your existing Virus and Spyware Protection, intrusion prevention, and firewall protection.

SONAR uses a heuristics system that leverages Symantec's online intelligence network with proactive local monitoring on your client computers to detect emerging threats. SONAR also detects changes or behavior on your client computers that you should monitor.

SONAR might inject some code into the applications that run in Windows user mode to monitor them for suspicious activity. In some cases, the injection might affect the application performance or cause problems with running the application. You can create an exception to exclude the file, folder, or application from this type of monitoring.

Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition clients version 12.0 or earlier do not support SONAR; however, legacy clients use TruScan proactive threat scans to provide protection against zero-day threats. TruScan proactive threat scans run periodically rather than in real time.

SONAR does not make detections on application type, but on how a process behaves. SONAR acts on an application only if that application behaves maliciously, regardless of its type. For example, if a Trojan horse or keylogger does not act maliciously, SONAR does not detect it.

SONAR detects the following items:

If you disable Auto-Protect, you limit SONAR's ability to make detections of high and low risk files. If you disable Insight lookups (reputation queries), you also limit the SONAR's detection capability.

See Managing SONAR

See Managing exceptions for Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition.