He said customers of Norton (Symantec's manufacturer of security solutions) shall be armed with the reputation-based software on the next software update and later in Symantec's consumer endpoints.

Yet Bregman noted Symantec would continue to use blacklisting to identify high-prevalence malware programs and would also build a massive whitelist to identify popular, legitimate programs and allow them to run unhindered.

Citing a report from the Symantec Research Lab (SRL), Bregman said among the security trends to watch out for in 2009 are: Explosion of malware variants, advanced Web threats, social networks, spam level rise, virtual machine security, and even the global economic crisis as it will be the basis of many new attacks like emails that promise abilities to easily get a mortgage or refinance.

Bergman confirmed reports that companies would tend to spend less on IT this year but clarified that it will be on using IT in business but not on IT security.