Data Fellows welcomes the millennium with a product line not affected by the Year 2000 dilemma.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 3, 1997--

Military-grade encryption products for networks, desktops and

laptops offers intelligent solutions to the Post-1999 applications

Data Fellows, the world's leading technology provider of data security solutions for computer networks and desktop and laptop computers, announces that its award-winning F-Secure product line will not face the dilemma that is shaking up the technology world: the approach of the year 2000.

"Our clients don't have to worry when New Year's Day comes around for the year 2000," says Petri Laakkonen, president of Data Fellows. "This situation was taken into account long before the crisis of the year 2000 began to sink in, raising fears and MIS budgets around the world."

The key to the year 2000 problem is the fact that many legacy applications use a two-digit ASCII representation for the year part of each date field in their internal data structures. While this conserves two bytes of space for each data stored in the system, it creates a rather obvious problem after Dec. 31, 1999, when many computer users will find their machines insisting on a return to Victorian times. Data Fellows technology, however, overcame this problem with the following solutions:

-- All dates are stored using an internal format which is independent of the presentation format. The internal format is a four-byte integer which does not have separate fields for the time, day, month or year.

-- The internal format which does not depend on the decimal digital system used for presenting years and other data fields. Thus, there are no special turning points or milestones where the internal date would need any special handling.

-- All Data Fellows applications display dates using the internationally standardized four-digit date format. However, users who prefer a two-digit date display are able to use this format since the presentation format is not used for anything else but showing the final result to the user.

The F-Secure product line includes F-Secure Desktop, suitable for PCs and laptops running either Windows 95 and Windows 3.x, which uses the state-of-the-art Blowfish encryption technology. It is equipped with 256-bit encryption keys -- twice the size of the key (128 bits) recommended for strong encryption -- to protect confidential files from unauthorized access, even if a user's system is stolen or exposed to corporate espionage. Also featured is F-Secure Virtual Private Network (VPN), a software-only solution which connects separate local area networks (LANs) together over the Internet, creating a military-grade encrypted virtual private network in cyberspace. No special hardware or proprietary systems are required to run the solution.

The line also features F-Secure SSH, which provides strongly authenticated and encrypted end-to-end connections between the Windows, Unix or Macintosh-based F-Secure SSH Client and the F-Secure SSH Server running on the server machine. F-Secure SSH secures login connections, file transfers, Web and e-mail connections, database access, as well as other popular TCP/IP applications over the untrusted network.

Privately-owned Data Fellows is the leading technology provider of data security solutions for computer networks and desktop computers. In November 1996, the company's F-Secure product line was awarded the European IT `96 Grand Prize of more than $200,000 organized by the European Commission's ITEA/EURO-CASE Secretariat. The products are available world-wide in more than 40 countries through Data Fellows and its global business partners. For more information, contact Data Fellows, 4000 Moorpark Avenue, Suite 207, San Jose, CA 95117; [phone]; fax [phone]; http://www.DataFellows.com or [e-mail] -0- All media inquiries: Open City Communications, [phone].

CONTACT: Open City Communications

Phil Hall/Matthew Papertsian

212/714-3575