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@stake

@stake, Inc. was a computer security professional services company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It was founded in 1999 by Battery Ventures (Tom Crotty, Sunil Dhaliwal, and Scott Tobin) and Ted Julian. Its initial core team of technologists included Dan Geer (Chief Technical Officer) and the east coast security team from Cambridge Technology Partners (including Dave Goldsmith). In January 2000, @stake acquired L0pht Heavy Industries (who were known for their many hacker employees), bringing on Mudge as its Vice President of Research and Development. Its domain name was atstake.com. It was acquired by Symantec in 2004.

In addition to Dan Geer and Mudge, @stake employed many famous security experts including Dave Aitel, Dildog, David Litchfield, Mike Schiffman, and Chris Wysopal.

In September 2000, an @stake recruiter contacted Mark Abene to recruit him for a security consultant position. The recruiter was apparently unaware of his past felony conviction since @stake had a policy of not hiring convicted hackers. Mark was informed by a company representative that @stake could not hire him, saying: "We ran a background check." This caused some debate regarding the role of convicted hackers working in the security business.

@stake was primarily a consulting company, but also created software tools for security: LC 5 was a password auditing and recovery tool also known as L0phtCrack; WebProxy was a security testing tool for Web applications; SmartRisk Analyzer was an application security analysis tool. The technology underlying SmartRisk Analyzer was extended, and eventually brought to market by the Symantec spinoff Veracode LC5 is scheduled to be end-of-lifed by Symantec in 2006.

Symantec announced its acquisition of @stake on September 16, 2004 and completed the transaction on October 9, 2004. Several members of @Stake left to form the computer security company iSec Partners in 2004.