Symantec to buy VeriSign's security arm for $1.28 Billion
By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 20 May 2010, 22:52 IST
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San Francisco: Symantec is going to pay $1.28 billion to buy VeriSign's identity and authentication business, a division of VeriSign. Symantec, known for its antivirus software for personal computers, will invest nearly $3 billion in two years to buy technologies, reports Associated Press. Since 2007, VeriSign had sold over a dozen businesses, earning nearly $1 billion. Buying VeriSign's Web-security arm, Symantec will get one of the Web's best-known brand names for security. All the websites, that have bought VeriSign's security technology, contain its logo. The division of VeriSign, bought by Symantec, sells certificates to websites that need protection for the customers' data. After being certified by the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates, all the data can be encrypted between a user's browser and a website's servers. Revenue in VeriSign's domain-name division increased up to 12 percent to $616 million last year. Under the terms of the deal, which is likely to end in the September quarter, Symantec will acquire VeriSign's Secure Sockets Layer certificate services, the Public Key Infrastructure services and VeriSign Identity Protection (VIP) authentication service business. VeriSign collects a fee as operator of the ".com" and ".net" registries from those who registers or renews a domain name ending in ".com" or ".net". As of July 1, the fees for per ".com" will be $7.34 and for per ".net" will be $4.65. Symantec had already entered into new partnership with Samsung, shipping Norton Internet security on their netbooks, and Norton online backup on their netbooks and notebooks. In addition, Fujitsu has also signed an agreement to ship Norton products globally on their consumer and commercial PCs.

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