Executive summary
Few areas of our lives remain untouched by the ongoing digital revolution. Modern society now depends on information and communications technology for its economic health, for the machinery of government, for national defence and for day-to-day social and cultural well-being. However, this increasing dependence on cyberspace has also increased our risk. As a result, users, service providers and network operators are under pressure to improve how they manage and protect their data, and secure their computer networks.
How vulnerable is your internet service?
The growth in malware – malicious software – has continued to increase exponentially. The evidence suggests that cyber criminals are exploiting the Internet on a massive scale to improve their returns. At the centre of many of their efforts are millions of 'infected' PCs in networks called 'botnets', which can be bought and controlled to facilitate crimes such as identity theft, extortion, fraud, forgery or blackmail.
Spam emails and phishing attacks initiated by botnets can present significant business challenges for service providers, such as IP-address blacklisting, which, in turn, can materially damage brand and reputation, and lead to customer churn. Protecting vulnerable users is an important –and often legislated – responsibility. With the launch of the GSM Association's 'Mobile Alliance Against Child Sexual Abuse Content', mobile operators are now seeking to implement an effective method of identifying child sexual abuse content and blocking access to it.
This means not only getting to grips with the complexity of analysing vast quantities of data, but also minimising the impact on day-to-day operations.
Indentifying the opportunities
Filtering of email-based content by major email service providers and dedicated IS (Information Systems) departments in large organisations is now commonplace. But cyber threats are not limited to email. The huge proliferation of realtime internet applications – from simple web browsing and instant messaging (IM) to peer-topeer(P2P) file sharing, voice over IP (VoIP), chat rooms and online gaming – means that email-only protection is no longer sufficient to meet the needs of today’s internet users. Instead, a new approach is needed to prevent malware, spam, inappropriate and offensive content and other threats from ever reaching the user.
