Commitments And Contingencies

9 Months Ended

Dec. 30, 2011

Commitments And Contingencies [Abstract]

Commitments And Contingencies

Note 9. Commitments and Contingencies

Indemnification

     As permitted under Delaware law, we have agreements whereby we indemnify our officers and directors for certain events or occurrences while the officer or director is, or was, serving at our request in such capacity. The maximum potential amount of future payments we could be required to make under these indemnification agreements is not limited; however, we have directors' and officers' insurance coverage that reduces our exposure and may enable us to recover a portion of any future amounts paid. We believe the estimated fair value of these indemnification agreements in excess of applicable insurance coverage is minimal.

     We provide limited product warranties and the majority of our software license agreements contain provisions that indemnify licensees of our software from damages and costs resulting from claims alleging that our software infringes the intellectual property rights of a third party. Historically, payments made under these provisions have been immaterial. We monitor the conditions that are subject to indemnification to identify if a loss has occurred.

Litigation Contingencies

     For a discussion of our tax litigation with the Internal Revenue Service relating to the 2000 and 2001 tax years of Veritas, see Note 13.

     We are also involved in a number of other judicial and administrative proceedings that are incidental to our business. Although adverse decisions (or settlements) may occur in one or more of the cases, it is not possible to estimate the possible loss or losses from each of these cases. The final resolution of these lawsuits, individually or in the aggregate, is not expected to have a material adverse effect on our financial condition or results of operations.

Other

     In January 2012, Symantec became aware of claims made by a group of hackers, that it possessed, and intended to publicly expose, portions of the source code for certain Symantec products. Following investigation of these claims, Symantec believes that the group came into possession of the code as a result of a theft of source code that occurred in 2006. Symantec believes that source code for the 2006-era versions of the following products was exposed: Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition; Norton Internet Security; Norton SystemWorks (Norton Utilities and Norton GoBack); and pcAnywhere. Symantec has announced that customers of Symantec's pcAnywhere product may face an increased security risk as a result of this exposure. The product, pcAnywhere, is also bundled with three Symantec products, Altiris Client Management Suite and Altiris IT Management Suite versions 7.0 or later, and Altiris Deployment Solution with Remote version 7.1. In addition, customers with earlier versions of Altiris suites may have opted to leverage pcAnywhere. The increased risk is isolated to the pcAnywhere components only. Symantec has broadly communicated an outline of the situation to customers, and has provided them with remediation steps to maintain the protection of their devices and information. As of the date of this filing, Symantec has resolved known vulnerabilities and does not believe that this incident will have a material adverse effect on its business, results of operations, financial condition or cash flows.