@stake

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@stake, Inc. was a computer security company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It was founded in 1999 by Dan Geer (who became its Chief Technical Officer) and others and merged in January 2000 with 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. LC5 is scheduled to be end-of-lifed by Symantec in 2006.

Symantec announced its acquisition of @stake on September 16, 2004^[1] and completed the transaction on October 9, 2004^[2].