Cyber criminals and hackers drawn by Hong Kong's flourishing economy and affluent population are targeting the city, IT security professionals warn.
The severity of the problem of unwanted e-mails was highlighted in the MessageLabs Intelligence monthly report in September. Spam accounted for 92.7 per cent of e-mail traffic in Hong Kong up to August, while the global spam rate was 91.7 per cent.
Spam is only one of the internet threats. 'On average, 1,919 new websites hosting malicious content are detected worldwide daily. Compounded with the explosion of social media sites and increased use of shortened URLs, it is difficult for users to determine if a site might be malicious until it has become too late,' says Nigel Mendonca, regional director for Asia at Symantec Hosted Services (SHS), a leading provider of online messaging and Web security services.
'There were 107 billion spam e-mails sent on a daily basis worldwide in 2009. Those spam e-mails, paired with a growing number of targeted Trojans, significantly increase the risk to endpoints. It only takes one employee visiting a site hosting malicious software or malware, or opening a single infected document, to open up the entire organisation to attackers.'
A Trojan is a type of computer virus that appears to perform a desirable function for the user prior to installation, but instead allows unauthorised access to the user's computer system.
SHS provides hosted security solutions by using the power of cloud computing to secure and manage information stored on endpoints and delivered via e-mail, the Web and instant messaging, Mendonca says. Cloud computing is internet-based computing whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, similar to the electricity grid.
'We have built on the foundation of MessageLabs' market leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings and proven Symantec technologies. SHS provides essential protection while virtually eliminating the need to manage hardware and software on site,' he says.