Symantec Network Security 7160 Appliance Earns ``NSS Approved'' Award In Intrusion Prevention Group Test

CUPERTINO, Calif.--Aug. 2, 2005--Symantec's Intrusion Prevention Appliance Achieves Stellar Scores in Extensive Testing of Performance, Security Effectiveness and Usability

Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq:SYMC) today announced that the Symantec Network Security 7160 Series appliance achieved the highest out-of-the-box scores in security effectiveness and near 100-percent scores for its other key capabilities in an independent test of Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) by The NSS Group, the world's foremost independent security testing facility. As a result, Symantec's intrusion prevention appliance earned the globally recognized "NSS Approved" award, given only to products that successfully complete the exhaustive tests of performance, security and usability.

The Symantec Network Security 7160 intrusion prevention appliance was reviewed during the NSS IPS Group Test, an extensive side-by-side comparison that used more than 800 tests to evaluate the performance and reliability, security effectiveness and usability of leading Network IPS products. The tests also simulated extreme situations often seen in enterprise environments.

"The Symantec Network Security 7160 appliance delivers very high levels of performance with first-rate policy management, incident management, alert handling and reporting out of the box," said Bob Walder, director, The NSS Group Ltd. "Its signature recognition was excellent out of the box, handling our demanding false positives, false negative and evasion tests easily, and was the only product to score 100 percent resistance to false positives out of the box, crucial for not blocking legitimate traffic. Overall, the Symantec Network Security 7160 appliance should definitely be considered for large-scale IPS/IDS deployments."

Performance and Reliability -- The Symantec Network Security 7160 continued to detect and block 100 percent of attacks while subjected to settings similar to an enterprise network under the most extreme conditions. According to the test, the Symantec Network Security 7160 appliance "performed consistently and completely reliably throughout our tests...Under eight hours of extended attack (comprising millions of exploits mixed with genuine traffic) it continued to block 100 percent of attack traffic, whilst passing 100 percent of legitimate traffic." The NSS Group confirmed Symantec's 1Gbps rating for this device under all normal conditions and commended its latency, stating that the appliance can be "deployed anywhere on a Gigabit network -- either internally or at the perimeter." The appliance also demonstrated its enterprise viability by maintaining state on more than 1,000,000 concurrent connections.

Security Effectiveness -- The Symantec Network Security 7160 appliance earned the highest out-of-the-box scores in security effectiveness, a category that includes attack detection and blocking, resistance to false positives and resilience against IPS evasion. Its innovative Intrusion Mitigation Unified Network Engine (IMUNE), coupled with Symantec's industry-leading threat intelligence and response capabilities helped the appliance achieve the only 100-percent score in attack detection and blocking, following an update. In addition, the Symantec Network Security 7160 appliance was the only solution to earn a 100-percent score for its resistance to false positives without an update and one of only two vendors to demonstrate perfect resistance to all evasion attempts, which are commonly used to bypass prevention and render an IPS useless. The NSS Group stated that the Symantec Network Security 7160 "achieved a clean sweep across the board in all our evasion tests."

Usability -- The NSS Group underscored Symantec Network Security 7160's strength in policy management, alert handling and reporting capabilities. The NSS Group found its policy management to be "powerful, scalable and intuitive," and commended the advanced correlation capability for alleviating the burden of distinguishing the genuine alerts from the irrelevant. Further, The NSS Group found Symantec Network Security 7160's incident handling capabilities, which are crucial for enterprise deployments, to be "very impressive...The ability to handle large quantities of data are vital in a high-bandwidth system, especially when it is possible to include events from third-party sensors, and SNS acquits itself with honours in this area."

"The NSS IPS Group Test results validate the superior capabilities of Symantec Network Security 7100 Series, specifically the devices' ability to detect and block today's broad range of attacks while handling real-world Internet traffic at high 1Gbps rates with very low latency," said Sandeep Kumar, director of product management for Symantec Network Security solutions. "That's a necessary formula for intrusion prevention solutions to effectively protect enterprise networks."

The NSS IPS Group Test is available for review at www.nss.co.uk/ips.

About Symantec Network Security 7100 Series

Symantec Network Security 7100 Series provides real-time, proactive network intrusion prevention to protect critical enterprise assets. An innovative Intrusion Mitigation Unified Network Engine (IMUNE(TM)) combines multiple detection technologies to accurately identify and block known, unknown (or "zero day") and DoS attacks, and stop worms from propagating throughout the network. Symantec LiveUpdate(TM) technology automatically updates protection policies to help organizations stay ahead of continuously evolving threats. The highly scalable, best-of-breed appliances meet a range of deployment needs by supporting aggregate network bandwidth from 50Mbps to 2Gbps across as many as eight network segments.

About The NSS Group

The NSS Group is the world's foremost independent security testing facility. With British headquarters, and security and network infrastructure testing facilities in the South of France, The NSS Group offers a range of specialist IT, networking and security-related services to vendors and end-user organisations world-wide. The NSS Group security testing laboratories are available to vendors and end-users for fully independent testing of networking, communications and security hardware and software. The NSS Group also operates certification schemes for vendors and certification bodies, and currently provides evaluation and certification of a wide range of security products, including IDS/IPS appliances, firewalls, VPNs, multi-function security appliances, cryptographic devices and PKI products.

Output from the labs, including detailed research reports, articles and white papers on the latest network and security technologies, are made available on the NSS web site at http://www.nss.co.uk.

About Symantec

Symantec is the world leader in providing solutions to help individuals and enterprises assure the security, availability, and integrity of their information. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Symantec has operations in more than 40 countries. More information is available at www.symantec.com.