We are under attack!” went out the cry from our in-house tech-wiz Lucas, who had just received a message from our e-mail provider to tell us that our sign7tv.com video sharing and broadcast news website was attempting to send out thousands of spam e-mails from its verification service.

The culprit was an automated ‘software robot’ that trawls the internet for websites that have registration systems to verify a user account. It had managed to leap frog the first level of security, where our users have to write out the jumbled photo of words into a little box, but had then fallen short at the next security ring we have installed for just such eventualities. However, in some cases these ‘bots’ manage to prompt users to send passwords and e-mail addresses to the hacking organisation itself. They do this by masquerading as the legitimate service provider, and can then break into these personal e-mail accounts. This is because most of us use the same passwords for everything.

There are thousands of these types of attacks going on across the UK every day, and if you do not think you are at risk, then think again. In addition to the famous Sony case recently, another case in the USA saw the country’s famous Home Depot chain face 21 separate lawsuits from customers’ data it had lost to hackers. Simply put, anyone with an e-commerce solution or a website that is linked to any kind of customer database is at risk.

Unfortunately, while statistics around real-world robberies are very well-known and documented, those around cyber-crime vary wildly. Indeed, a recent study by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies concluded that the cost to world businesses is anywhere between $300bn (£198bn) and $1trn (£659bn). Famously one of the team has publicly, if depressingly, stated that proper data in this area is so scarce that they had joked about publishing the findings online with a random-number generator so people could just pick the figure that suited them. What is clear though is that the enemy is growing stronger, so it is probably past time that you reassessed your own frontline defences.

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