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ONLINE SECURITY: The Spooks are Snooping Online

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CIOL Bureau
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Whenever someone speaks about network or IT security, the thought rarely goes beyond hackers and attackers releasing viruses, worms or trojans. But 2004 saw increased activity on invasion of privacy and confidentiality of users through spywares and phishing.

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According to a report by WatchGuard Technologies, 67 percent of security managers said spyware posed greater threat to their networks than viruses, and 10 percent considered phishing as a major threat. While 65 percent agree that they are least protected against spyware, still they concentrated more on handling viral attacks.

In another report on security threat by Symantec, between July 2004 and December 2004, of the top 50 malicious codes, spywares comprised 5 percent, up by one percent when compared with the first half figures of 2004. For phishing, the figures were scary with more than three fold increase in the number of attempts being filtered per week. In July, almost 9 million phishing attempts were filtered which went to 33 million in December.

Both spyware and phishing, in most cases, do not cause much harm to the network directly apart from hogging the bandwidth. But for e-commerce companies, financial institutions and organizations transacting over the Internet, they pose serious threats. These malicious programmes or codes can be used to gather sensitive and confidential data like credit card numbers, passwords and user IDs and can cause huge financial losses.

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