Spam-Fighting Power with Symantec Brightmail

Next Generation in Spam- Fighting Power with Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam 6.0

Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam Version 6.0 Delivers Next Generation Spam- Fighting Power And Control To Enterprises

Market Leader Protects Against The Latest Spamming Techniques With New Non-English Language Filters And Powerful Administration Enhancements

NEW ZEALAND, Auckland - July 6, 2004 - Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC), the global leader in information security, has announced Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam Version 6.0. The new solution is designed to further protect enterprises from the latest spamming techniques by providing new non-English language filters and powerful administration enhancements. Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam 6.0 also now includes a centralized Web-based control center, consolidated logging and reporting, and global policies that can be created on a per-user or per-group basis.

"Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam 6.0 demonstrates Symantec's commitment to providing its customers with the most innovative and technically proficient anti-spam solution on the market," said Enrique Salem, senior vice president, gateway solutions, Symantec Corp. "With version 6.0, we have raised the bar on anti-spam technology and dramatically improved the power of our industry-leading effectiveness and accuracy, while giving our customers more control over their spam protection."

"While improving spam defenses is critical, another area of great importance to end-user organizations is creating operational efficiencies for spam defenses," said Matt Cain, senior vice president, META Group, a leading provider of information technology research, advisory services, and strategic consulting. "Aspects such as single console management, fast and accurate reporting and troubleshooting via rolled up multi-node logs, and granular and bulk policy creation are essential in improving spam defenses while lowering the administrative overhead."

Expanded Defense Against Email Threats

Symantec estimates between 10-20% of all global spam is non-English, making non-English spam a critical issue for any company, especially in countries where English is not the primary language. Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam 6.0 can identify messages in any of 11 languages, enabling the software to run only the filters that apply to the message's language, increasing the performance of Symantec's foreign language filtering capabilities. End-users also have the ability to define the languages in which they want to receive and/or block messages. Symantec has also added language-specific heuristics that analyze messages for language-specific characteristics of spam, which further improves effectiveness.

In addition to Symantec's non-English language filtering, the Symantec Brightmail Probe Network attracts spam from 20 different countries around the world and Symantec Brightmail Logistics and Operations Centers (BLOC) offer native language capabilities in San Francisco, Dublin, Sydney and Taipei.

The attachment signature technology included in Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam 6.0 enables Symantec to create filters based on a specific MIME attachment (for example, a specific pornographic image file) seen in the Probe Network. These attachment signatures protect organizations from spam with commonly appearing attachments.

The 3rd generation URL filters included in Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam 6.0 identify spam both based on Web URLs and also using "mailto" URLs to prevent end-user replies to spammers via email. This 3rd generation technology can detect even more types of URL masking techniques. The URL filters are developed based on URLs seen in the Symantec Brightmail Probe Network, a collection of millions of decoy accounts that are seeded across the Internet to attract spam.

Symantec Brightmail Reputation Service provides customers with benefits not found anywhere else in the industry. Symantec Brightmail Reputation Service is entirely data-driven, and behavior-based and identifies senders of spam and legitimate mail based on a sender's reputation. Symantec Brightmail Reputation Service determines an email source's reputation by leveraging information collected from Symantec Probe Network along with the more than 100 billion messages each month that Symantec filters. The service is designed to offer the highest protection rate and lowest margin of error with hourly list updates making it more nimble than other industry reputation-monitoring services. Version 6.0 offers customers the ability to implement two new lists - Suspected IP and Safe IP lists.

More Administrative Power And Control

Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam 6.0 adds new administrative features that improve upon Symantec's widely recognized "set and forget" administrative controls. Symantec's Web-based management console is a cross-platform tool that provides information to email administrators on system status, quarantine, server settings, reports, logging, and much more.

Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam 6.0 gives administrators the ability to set its anti-spam systems in compliance with differing company-wide, internal and overall legal requirements on the blocking, disposal and investigation of spam. For example, a default setting for the whole company might be that all spam is deleted and all suspected spam is quarantined. However, in organizations where all email must be stored for a period of time, a group of users or one individual in the legal department can be allocated a different setting (for example, "Quarantine all spam and suspected spam").

For large organizations that require multiple Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam servers, the new centralized management capabilities allow administrators to view and generate consolidated logs and reports for all Symantec servers in the network.

Symantec recently completed the acquisition of Brightmail on June 21, 2004. Brightmail's market-leading anti-spam technology will be a key complement to Symantec's broad array of gateway security solutions. For more information regarding Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam 6.0 please visit www.brightmail.com .

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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