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John Church

It's like an endless game of four-dimensional chess, with the internet being the 'board', the security firms and cyber criminals the white and the black pieces - knight takes rook, bishop blocks knight and so on - and your company among the pawns.
It's a game no one will win. The good guys can only react to the hackers' next attack and are only as good as their last move - and sooner or later your pawn will be moved forward, Harry Potter-style, into danger.
Alec Yu, Blue Coat managing director, Greater China sales, said the consequences if you weren't  protected  were  'tangible and intangible'.
'They're tangible in terms of lost business at so many hours worth X dollars. On the intangible side, you're definitely blemished and the confidence of your customers will be damaged,' Mr Yu said.
Blue Coat clients include some of the world's largest financial institutions, manufacturing organisations and government  agencies, and claims that 93 of the Fortune Global 100 companies depend on its award-winning appliances for Secure Web Gateway or WAN Application Delivery.
One of its most impressive features is a real-time filter which can look at unrated pages and attempt to assign categories to them in real-time, called Dynamic Real-Time Rating (DRTR).
Like the chessboard, Mr Yu  said a security system was only as good as the hackers' last attack.
'I think the most difficult part is dealing with something where you don't know what will happen tomorrow,' he said.
'You can set up a lot of things to safeguard against what has happened in the past, but hackers are very sophisticated today, so while you're setting up something it may not be able to cope with future changes.'
Michael Gazeley,  managing director of Network Box, has been in the computer networks business in Hong Kong for 20 years, and described the consequences of a business remaining unprotected as 'legion'.
'From the point of view of business continuity, a virus or worm can take out your network and leave you completely floundering,' Mr Gazeley said.
'Equally, you might have secret data - your client data, perhaps an invention you're trying to patent, or maybe designs you've spent millions of dollars on for your new product range. You could find you've lost all that, or in some ways worse, it is strewn across the internet and you no longer have any control over it.
'With your home, the interesting thing is that most people do some work at home, and laptops travelling between the home and the office are one of the prime vectors for getting an office network infected.
'We see many cases where users take laptops back to the office, plug them in and next thing you have 300 PCs infected with the same worm.' Network Box is a managed security company that offers unified threat management (UTM) to its clients and was Hong Kong Technology Company of the year at the Computerworld Hong Kong Awards 2007.
Once commissioned, Mr Gazeley said, full UTM would become  available. Firewall, VPN (Virtual Private Networking), IDP (Intrusion Detection and Prevention), anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-phishing, anti-worm, anti-spam, content filtering, and organisational policy enforcement systems, all work to protect clients' networks from external threats. Each Network Box system is also fully monitored, updated and managed in real-time.
'Of businesses that call us, the minority are planners, but unfortunately the vast majority are victims that have already been hit,' Mr Gazeley said.
'A typical case is someone ringing up in a panic with anything up to a few hundred PCs that no longer function.
'Perhaps more insidious is that we sometimes get called in as a last resort because their companies know their designs are regularly seen outside and they're fairly sure their own staff aren't acting as corporate spies, but they can't understand why their data is so freely out there. We've had cases where people's factory pricing - on sports shoes, for example, that might cost US$2 in the factory and be sold for US$80 - has been sent to the retail customers.
'There's also genuine corporate responsibility where if you're manufacturing on someone's behalf, you may have designs that are very serious trade secrets which, if they get out there, could end your company.'
Michael Chue,  managing director of Symantec Hong Kong and Taiwan, said the internet threat landscape had moved on from the days when all we needed to worry about was protection against viruses. Far more damaging today, he said, was the risk of losing confidential information that could be used for identity theft and online fraud.
'In the current internet age, hackers, viruses, phishing scams and other threats continue to target our identities, our privacy and our information,' he said.
And it's not just companies. Home users are particularly vulnerable. According to the latest Internet Security Threat Report released by Symantec on September 18, home users are the targets of 95 per cent of all internet attacks.
'This same report also highlighted that Hong Kong is increasingly targeted by phishing attacks and has moved from the fourth to the second-highest ranked city in the Asia-Pacific region,'  Mr Chue said. 'A possible reason is that the average income/purchasing power is higher in Hong Kong than in most other parts of China and the  Asia-Pacific region, making the residents of Hong Kong potentially lucrative phishing targets.'
But there are ways to protect yourself. 'Use an internet security solution that combines anti-virus, firewall, intrusion detection, and vulnerability management, such as Norton 360,' Mr Chue said. 'This product takes a lot of the decision making away from the end user, meaning they can enjoy their online world while N360 works quietly in the background to provide comprehensive protection.'
Mr Gazeley said PC users could easily forget that when you connected to the internet, the internet was also connected to you.
'People tend to mentally view it as a one-way street. They forget the connection is very high-speed, two ways and often 24/7, and if you don't protect yourself it can have serious consequences.'
He said people also acted as their own worst enemies by not using common sense. 'If you're not patched and a worm comes along, you're going to get infected, but there's also a lot of social engineering that goes on,' he said, referring to the scams that hackers used to coax you to open their infected mail.
'So if you get an e-card from a neighbour who isn't a neighbour, don't open it.'



Stay one move ahead in a dangerous game