Finnish President Awarded F-Secure SSH the Finnish Innovation Prize

San Jose, CA, December 16, 1996 - The F-Secure product family and the Data Fellows development partner SSH Communication Security were awarded the premier Innosuomi Prize by the President of Finland, Mr. Martti Ahtisaari.

The Innosuomi Prizes are given yearly to the most successful Finnish innovations. This year, the prize was awarded to the industry leading strong encryption product, F-Secure SSH, developed by Data Fellows in cooperation with SSH Communication Security Oy. F-Secure SSH has become the global de-facto standard of Internet encryption in 12 months.

The prize is a continuation to the recent success story of F-Secure. On 26 of November, the product was nominated the Grand Prize Winner of the premier European Information Technology Prize awarded by the European Commission. The Grand Prize is worth 200.000 ECU. Altogether 253 products from 25 European countries took part in the competition.

F-Secure has also won two other prizes in the beginning of December. The biggest Scandinavian IT magazine MikroPC selected the product as the ‘Business Software Product of the Year’. In this competition, the F-Secure beat, for instance, MS Office 97 and Windows CE. Also Finnish Information Processing Association (FIPA) has selected F-Secure as the 'Achievement of the Year’. FIPA is formed of 23 member societies with a total of about 23 000 individual members and 661 enterprises.

F-Secure product family of Data Fellows

F-Secure products, based on industry-leading SSH encryption technology, provide exceptionally strong encryption, cryptographic host authentication, and integrity protection for popular TCP/IP applications used on the Internet and Intranets. F-Secure products work with Windows, Macintosh and UNIX computers. They are available world-wide. Thousands of organizations count on SSH technology to protect their business assets.

The SSH technology used in the F-Secure product family is an extraordinary innovation by any standards. It has become the de-facto standard for Internet encryption in 12 months.

It is estimated that by 1997, there will be 75 million users connected to the Internet. More than 50 million of these users will be newcomers, having joined the Internet during 1996. According to estimations made by different consulting companies, the number of Internet users will double during 1997, reaching 150 million. Furthermore, the recent study by the Yankee Group shows business-to-business Internet commerce will surge to $134 billion by 2000.

The major obstacle to the realization of these projections is the lack of data security in the Internet. Security, more increasingly world-wide as trade barriers vanish, is vital specially in electronic commerce and on the Intranets. Firewalls are not able to secure transactions made over publicly accessible networks such as the Internet.

In the future Internet technology will be used in such fields as TV entertainment, telephones, Xerox machines, faxes and teller machines. All these and other usages of the Internet will need to incorporate strong crypto-technologies in order to be successfully deployed.