How safe is your IT security?

How safe is your IT security?
By Graham Fern, director of axon-IT

Published: May 22 2009 09:49 | Last updated: May 22 2009 09:49

The largest challenge facing businesses today is IT security. As business become increasingly reliant on the data in its systems, it faces an ever-increasing threat to the network and data integrity.

Everyone is aware of issues regarding internet usage and the security of electronic data stored or transmitted to third parties. Recently, Microsoft issued a report indicating that 97 per cent of all e-mails sent over the net are unwanted – spam is dominant.

So is IT security really an issue or are we just scaremongering?

The simple answer is yes, security is a big problem if you don’t take reasonable protective measures. So how do you “shut the door” to your PC network?

Simple steps can reduce the risk – data must be protected but without spending very large amounts of money. The solutions differ slightly between home and business users but we’re looking here at business.

IT systems use a multi-layered approach to ensure security, similar to methods used in banks. When it comes to protecting the money, banks place their highest security closest to the money – the vault door with complex alarms, together with the front of house security.

This multi-layered approach allows and encourages normal people into the bank, but in turn discourages the thief, who is faced with a difficult path to the money.

This is similar for IT systems and the data they contain: IT security should be tiered with multiple levels of security from the front door to the bank vault.

So how does this translate into the real world?

First, e-mail, a recent Microsoft study determined that e-mail was the number one use of a PC. So if e-mail is important we need steps to ensure the e-mails received are relevant to the business:

We need a device or a service that “cleans” e-mails of spam, and that removes viruses at the same time, ensuring what arrives in an inbox is relevant and safe.

Such systems are not 100 per cent perfect, therefore any system must be able to learn and needs to be simple to use and administer. This protection then needs to be extended to the PC itself as another layer – in the form of a suite of software that blocks and inhibits spyware, viruses, malware, spam etc.

This software needs to be adaptive to the threats and learn quickly, it also needs to talk to a central system with status information.

Firewalls can also stop the internet from getting inside your computer network. They vary considerably in features and price and one size does not fit all.

Best practice is usually for a relatively simple and fast device to be placed closest to the internet to undertake simple security blocking tasks (like the front door to the bank). Closer to the users you would place a more complex device (like the bank vault) that can undertake a very fine inspection of information flowing in.

These complex devices can also inspect/block what is going out from your network, which can be a useful productivity and security tool if your staff are surfing potentially unsafe websites that could contain spyware and viruses.

The use of professionally written, intelligent and well executed viral code is becoming widespread. These code writers use the same processes and procedures a professional application developer would use to ensure the highest quality virus.

Infections today are less openly destructive than they used to be – yet more damaging – as virus writers now know they can extract useful and valuable data that has a financial worth, such as credit card details. Infected machines have allowed thieves to undertake money laundering, gain remote access to internal database systems, allowed terrorism to be funded, and other criminal activities.

These attacks are not just limited to small time ad-hoc efforts but they can be streamlined targeted affairs for a particular purpose. This type of criminal activity is rapidly becoming mainstream, the number of detected viruses over the past two years is almost equal to all the viruses detected since they started recording such information.


Axon IT is accredited as a Microsoft Gold Partner with a specialisation in security.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009