Press Release

CUPERTINO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 16, 2004--Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC), the global leader in information security, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire @stake, Inc., a leading digital security company that helps corporations secure their critical infrastructure and applications. The transaction is expected to close in October.

@stake provides digital security consulting services and award-winning security auditing and analysis products to assess and manage risk in the technologies that are deployed in corporate environments. Its consultants have a strong foundation in research and combine technical expertise with a business focus to create comprehensive security solutions to manage risks across complex enterprise IT environments. @stake's solutions enable electronic business in a variety of industries including banking and finance, e-business, software development, and telecommunications.

"Our customers are looking to us for a broad range of security expertise," said Gail Hamilton, executive vice president of Symantec Global Services and Support. "By joining forces with the leader in application security consulting, we expand the capacity and capabilities of our consulting organization, which allows us to better secure the applications that our customers develop and deploy."

In addition to its consultants' deep industry knowledge, @stake's SmartRisk services address key aspects of security, including applications, critical infrastructure, wireless and wired networks, storage systems, and education.

"As a trusted advisor to many of the world's largest companies, @stake is excited about joining Symantec. This will allow our relationships to scale and allow us to support the long-term security needs of these key customers," said James Mobley, @stake president and CEO. "Joining Symantec means that we can expand our offering to a much broader global customer base. Symantec's reputation and @stake's expertise form a powerful and complementary partnership."

@stake has gained market traction in industries such as finance, telecommunications, and software technology whose success depends upon conducting business via secure applications and complex infrastructures. Its customers include six of the world's top ten financial institutions, four of the world's top ten independent software companies and seven of the world's top ten telecommunications carriers.

Beyond its consulting services, @stake also uses a range of proprietary tools in customer engagements. @stake LC 5 is an award-winning application to help administrators comprehensively audit and recover user and administrator passwords. @stake WebProxy is a powerful and interactive application security tool that helps software developers, quality engineers, and security professionals test and enhance the security of Web applications and enables developers to observe precisely how Web applications respond to staged attacks.

@stake SmartRisk(TM) Analyzer is an automated solution for identifying security vulnerabilities in software applications. It allows consultants to work with developers and quality assurance teams to find and fix security flaws early in the development cycle, reducing risk and saving money on incident response.

In addition to its services and products, @stake has developed Centers of Excellence that are dedicated to researching and documenting security flaws in operating systems, networking protocols, application software, or hardware devices. Symantec plans to incorporate these complementary products and services into its global professional services to better address the security threats and technology products that face its customers today.

About Symantec

Symantec is the global leader in information security providing a broad range of software, appliances and services designed to help individuals, small and mid-sized businesses, and large enterprises secure and manage their IT infrastructure. Symantec's Norton brand of products is the worldwide leader in consumer security and problem-solving solutions. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Symantec has operations in more than 35 countries. More information is available at http://www.symantec.com.

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Symantec and the Symantec logo are trademarks or registered trademarks, in the United States and certain other countries, of Symantec Corporation. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of the individual companies and are respectfully acknowledged.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENT: This press release contains forward-looking statements, including the expected consummation of the @stake merger and the effectiveness of the combined companies, that involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to differ materially from results expressed or implied by this press release. Such risk factors include, among others: the sustainability of recent growth rates, particularly in consumer products; whether certain market segments, particularly enterprise security, grow as anticipated; the positioning of Symantec's products in those segments; the competitive environment in the software industry; ability to integrate acquired companies and technology; ability to retain key employees; ability to successfully combine product offerings and customer acceptance of combined products; general market conditions, fluctuations in currency exchange rates, changes to operating systems and product strategy by vendors of operating systems; and whether Symantec can successfully develop new products and the degree to which these gain market acceptance. Actual results may differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements in this press release. Additional information concerning these and other risk factors is contained in the Risk Factors sections of Symantec's previously filed Form 10-K and Form 10-Q.

    CONTACT: Symantec Corporation
             Linda Smith Munyan, 415-365-6120 (Media)
             linda_munyan@symantec.com
             David Gennarelli, 408-517-5275 (Investors)
             david_gennarelli@symantec.com

    SOURCE: Symantec Corporation