@stake

ATstake, 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. In July 2000, @stake acquired Cerberus Information Security Limited of London, England, from David and Mark Litchfield and Robert Stein-Rostaing, to be their launchpad into Europe, the Middle East and Africa. @stake was subsequently acquired by Symantec in 2004.In addition to Dan Geer and Mudge, @stake employed many famous security experts including Dildog, David Litchfield, Mark Kriegsman, 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.