Symantec Awarded Funding from European Commission for Third Long-Term Research Project

New Symantec Research Lab - Europe to work in collaboration with Europe’s leading technology research organizations to investigate existing and emerging Internet threats

Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced that the European Commission has awarded funding to Symantec for collaborative research in Internet threats. The three-year project, known as the Worldwide Observatory of Malicious Behaviours and Attack Threats (WOMBAT), aims at providing new means to understand the existing and emerging threats that are targeting the Internet economy and its users. Symantec’s new Symantec Research Lab – Europe at Sophia Antipolis in the south of France will work in collaboration with the WOMBAT consortium to gain better insight into Internet threats and malicious code trends.

The WOMBAT project will leverage Symantec’s world leading Global Intelligence Network, explore new sensor technologies in wireless and crawler systems, enhance collaboration between experts, explore new techniques to characterize the observed attacks, and develop new models that help security advisors choose the correct countermeasure to defend against the latest threat. More information on WOMBAT may be found at www.wombat-project.eu.

WOMBAT marks the third long-term research project since 2004 for which Symantec has received funding in the European Commission’s highly competitive selection process. Symantec is also currently working with research institutions, world-leading technology companies and European telecommunications providers on the European Commission’s three-year AntiPhish project and recently completed the European Commission’s 33-month-long research Project LOBSTER for security protection of European broadband. “Symantec is honored to continue its world-leading research efforts with the European community and leverage the unique expertise of its highly skilled and respected talent base,” said Brian Witten, senior director of Government Research, Symantec. “The combined efforts of our new Symantec Research Lab and European Commission project will help provide businesses and consumers the information and tools they need for greater confidence online.”

Symantec’s new research facility in Europe in France will focus on innovation, generation of new ideas and development of next-generation technologies. Symantec Research Labs will work on projects with external government agencies, universities and businesses that include both long-term studies and shorter term innovations that provide immediate benefit to customers across all of Symantec’s businesses. Past commercialized technologies from Symantec Research Labs include the company’s first antispam technology, generic exploit blocking technology to proactively stop fast-spreading network threats, technology to improve the performance of Symantec’s backup products and technology to help protect critical infrastructure.

Symantec Research Labs – Europe will be led by Marc Dacier, Ph.D., an internationally recognized expert in computer security. Before joining Symantec Research Labs – Europe, Dr. Dacier taught networking and operational computing security at Eurecom, a graduate school and research center in communications systems and one of Europe’s most active academic research institutions, especially in the field of network and computer security. In addition to his extensive work in academia, Dr. Dacier has also served in industry, perhaps most notably as manager of the Global Security Analysis Lab at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory. Dr. Dacier has served on more than 50 program committees of major security and dependability conferences and has been a member of the editorial board of several technical journals.