Sydney, Australia – November 17, 2004 - Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC), the global leader in information security, today announced several new features in Symantec Enterprise Security Manager (ESM), an industry-leading policy compliance solution that enables organisations to effectively manage business risks by identifying threats and measuring compliance to security practices and regulations. Symantec ESM is a key element in achieving information integrity by helping organisations better manage their information environment.

Symantec ESM 6.1 delivers new flexible and powerful compliance reporting using an enterprise-class reporting framework, powered by Cognos, a leader in business intelligence. The reporting framework delivers unparalleled access to security audit findings, meeting the information needs of everyone from the executive to the security administrator. Organisations can create a wide variety of impromptu reports or produce advanced reports using the advanced report-authoring tool. Reports can be automatically scheduled and delivered via email or accessed through a new Web portal. Symantec ESM also provides more than 75 predefined reports showing compliance state and trends, specific violations and configuration changes on host systems.

In addition, Symantec ESM simplifies regulatory compliance with new pre-configured policy assessment templates for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, plus updates for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), North America Electric Reliability Council (NERC) and the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) (NIST 800-53) regulations. Further, the solution includes industry best practice security policies ISO17799, SANS Top 20 and Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmarks.

" Organisations must develop and deploy network security policies to protect against today's sophisticated threats," said Rowan Trollope, vice president, security management at Symantec. "Symantec ESM is a powerful tool that helps maintain information availability and security by ensuring systems are compliant with stringent regulatory standards and that unpatched vulnerabilities are discovered, contained and fixed promptly."

With unparalleled performance and scalability, Symantec ESM provides centralised, automated and comprehensive security analysis of organisations' critical business applications and operating systems for greater understanding of the overall information environment. Performing more than 2,500 different security and vulnerability checks automatically, it offers accurate security assessment on the broadest range of operating system platforms, including newly added support for Windows, UNIX, Linux, OS/400, NetWare and VMS systems.

Organisations can also download the most current Security Updates through Symantec's LiveUpdate technology and deploy them enterprise-wide through the Symantec ESM console. Backed by Symantec Security Response, the world's leading Internet security research and support organisation, Symantec ESM leverages sophisticated threat and early warning systems to provide customers with comprehensive, global, 24x7 Internet security expertise to proactively guard against today's blended Internet threats.

Symantec ESM is a key component of the Symantec Security Management System, which is comprised of multiple components that can be purchased and deployed separately, but also integrate with one another to provide the right set of security management applications unique to individual business objectives. When used within the framework of the Symantec Security Management System, policy compliance data collected and analysed by Symantec ESM can be correlated with security event data from firewalls, intrusion detection systems and vulnerability assessment products. This enables organisations to prioritise actions, respond rapidly to incidents, contain and eradicate threats faster, and utilise the full potential of security investments.

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 www.symantec.com.