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News Release Symantec Improves Internet Update Speed/Availability By 800% Symantec's LiveUpdate Technology Ready to Handle Any Virus Crisis as One-Year Anniversary of Melissa Nears CUPERTINO, Calif. - March 15, 2000 -- Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced significant improvement of the patented LiveUpdate infrastructure to handle the increase in Internet update requests that typically are triggered by virus crises. As the one-year anniversary of the Melissa virus crisis nears, Symantec will improve the availability and speed at which customers can get updates via the Internet by 800 percent. Later this month, Symantec will increase the number of LiveUpdate servers to more than 2,000 in locations around the world. This will provide local access to customers in all major markets around the world, improving the speed at which updates are downloaded and the availability of updates at peak download times. Since the Melissa virus crisis last year, Symantec quadrupled the LiveUpdate bandwidth and will again quadruple the capacity by early Summer 2000. LiveUpdate currently accounts for more than 845 gigabits pushed over the Internet each day. In the last week alone, there have been nearly 6 million anti-virus definition updates via LiveUpdate. "Every network administrator and end-user needs an easy, automatic way to keep their anti-virus protection current - whether at an individual desktop or across an enterprise," said John W. Thompson, Symantec chairman, president and CEO. "Symantec has been a pioneer at taking advantage of the Internet to provide our customers with virus definition and program updates and will continue to set the standard for maintaining Internet security." Symantec has offered both enterprise customers and consumers a solution for providing virus definitions and software updates via the Internet through its patented LiveUpdate technology since 1996, first incorporated into Norton AntiVirus 2.0 for Windows NT. Symantec was awarded U.S. Pat. No. 5,790,796 on Aug. 4, 1998. Symantec offers LiveUpdate technology across its product line including Norton AntiVirus Enterprise Solutions, Norton Internet Security, and Norton SystemWorks. Symantec's patented LiveUpdate technology simplifies the update process and provides customers with a revolutionary way to protect against both today's virus threats and those that will appear in the future - a critical requirement when, on average, 10 to 15 new viruses are discovered every day. LiveUpdate automatically detects an Internet connection and downloads and installs the latest virus definitions. Norton AntiVirus users can schedule LiveUpdate to run at regular intervals or can trigger it manually by pressing the LiveUpdate button. In addition to receiving Symantec's weekly virus definition updates, LiveUpdate may also be used to install software patches and obtain product information. Norton AntiVirus features a modular engine called NAVEX that allows Symantec to ship fundamental changes and updates to the engine technology. LiveUpdate delivers this engine, but the NAVEX technology is what keeps these changes small enough to download over the Internet. With Symantec's patent-pending MicroDefinition technology, LiveUpdate downloads only the changes since the last update, saving connection time online and reducing the network bandwidth required.
About Symantec NOTE TO EDITORS: : If you would like additional information on Symantec Corporation and its products, please view the Symantec Press Center at http://www.symantec.com/PressCenter/ on Symantec's Web site. All prices noted are in US dollars and are valid only in the United States. Symantec, the Symantec logo, VERITAS, and the VERITAS logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the United States and certain other countries. 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. There are certain important factors that could cause Symantec's future development efforts to differ materially from those anticipated by some of the statements made above. Among these are the anticipation of the growth of certain market segments, the positioning of Symantec's products in those segments, the competitive environment in the software industry, dependence on other products, changes to operating systems and product strategy by vendors of operating systems, and the importance of new Symantec products. Additional information concerning those and other factors is contained in the "Risk Factors" section of the company's annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended April 2, 1999 and all quarterly reports filed subsequent to such date.
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