Symantec Introduces New Vulnerability Assessment Solution

Symantec Vulnerability Assessment Provides Vulnerability Identification and Prioritization to Proactively Secure Systems at Risk

MUMBAI -- May 22, 2003 -- the world leader in Internet security, today announced the release of Symantec Vulnerability Assessment, which provides greater control of the network infrastructure through the identification and prioritization of vulnerabilities and by providing extensive information on remediation actions.

"Symantec documented more than 2,500 new vulnerabilities over the past year, an 81.5 percent increase over 2001. Unfortunately, many organizations are unaware of the vulnerabilities in their systems and applications, and are unable to determine if the identified vulnerabilities have been resolved," said Joy Ghosh, Country Manager, Symantec India. "Symantec Vulnerability Assessment optimizes the control and minimizes the complexity of identifying vulnerable systems, and provides extensive remediation information customers need to proactively secure their systems and applications."

Symantec Vulnerability Assessment determines vulnerable systems and applications across an enterprise faster and more thoroughly than individual network-based scanners. It also prioritizes vulnerabilities in terms of urgency, impact rating and remediation, allowing staff to focus on the most critical vulnerabilities first.

Symantec Vulnerability Assessment is also the first vulnerability assessment solution to leverage the extensive, industry-leading vulnerability database from Symantec, which is indexed to identify threats recognized by CVE and Bugtraq in order to allow administrators to focus their resources on relevant, high-impact vulnerabilities and attacks. Symantec Security Response delivers up-to-the-minute vulnerability signatures and detailed remediation steps, including links to patches and online knowledge bases.

Symantec's LiveUpdate technology is integrated into Symantec Vulnerability Assessment to provide rapid, automatic deployment of new security updates and modules, helping security professionals understand vulnerabilities and their potential impacts, and apply appropriate safeguards and patches to effectively repair the vulnerabilities in their IT environments.

"With the number of documented system vulnerabilities skyrocketing each year, organizations need to take proactive measures to prevent the loss of valuable information and protect business productivity," added Joy Ghosh. "Symantec Vulnerability Assessment identifies and prioritizes systems so that organizations can proactively prevent the exploitation of potential breaches that threaten the confidentiality, integrity and availability of systems."

In addition, Symantec Vulnerability Assessment can be tightly integrated with Symantec Incident Manager 2.0 to correlate vulnerabilities and convert them into actionable incidents, which reduces false positives since administrators can readily focus on the systems that are most vulnerable to an attack.

Availability
Symantec Vulnerability Assessment is available through Symantec's worldwide network of value-added authorized resellers, distributors and systems integrators.

About Symantec
Symantec, the world leader in Internet security technology, provides a broad range of content and network security software and appliance solutions to individuals, enterprises and service providers. The company is a leading provider of client, gateway and server security solutions for virus protection, firewall and virtual private network, vulnerability management, intrusion detection, Internet content and e-mail filtering, remote management technologies and security services to enterprises and service providers around the world. Symantec's Norton brand of consumer security products is a leader in worldwide retail sales and industry awards. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Symantec has worldwide operations in 36 countries. For more information, please visit www.symantec.com.

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