Web Threats Weekly
Online Threats "Exponentially Greater" Than A Few Years Ago
When you've got a website, protecting your organization from liability is clearly tied to protecting your customers. This is true whether you've got 200 customers or 20 million.
This week, we've asked travel and medical insurance providers MEDEX Global Group's Manager of Information Technology, Eddie Jenkins, to provide tips for organizations to protect your online visitors. MEDEX actually does protect 20 million customers, so they've had to incorporate some tough security into their business.
"Just to give you an idea of the challenge, we've got about 500 port scans of our website that we have to review on a daily basis," Jenkins says. "The online threats are exponentially greater than what we were seeing just a few years ago. These days security is a much higher priority."
They recommend a combination of security measures. "We use SSL encryption and don't collect any information except on our checkout page. Our website is scanned daily for hackers, checking for SQL injection or any holes in the code that would give a hacker access to our backend systems. "
And organizations can do even more. "We suggest using policy certifications, and following certain compliance procedures, such as making sure you are Safe Harbor approved. In our case, we also use a certified ethical hacker to test out our applications and make sure they can't be hacked."
Selling the idea of investing in security to business managers in the past may have been challenging for some organizations, but now most businesses recognize the critical importance of protecting end-users to ultimately protect the business, Jenkins adds.
Help Beat The Hackers In 2009. Here's How You Can Help
* Let us know about how your organization is helping keep your website visitors safe and your online safety tips could be featured in the next Web Threats Weekly!
* PCIS is producing webinars in 2009 to help organizations better understand how to identify and prevent web vulnerabilities. If there's a topic you'd like us to address in our webinars, please let us know and we can put it into our webinar series.
* Call us if your organization needs help understanding how to close off vulnerabilities to SQL injection and other hacker threats.
Beat the hackers in 2009. Contact PCIS.
This Internet May Harm Your Computer
A human error this weekend affecting Google’s safe-browsing functionality tagged all websites on the Internet as “This site may harm your computer", meaning all sites were allegedly infected by malware.
The
people at Google fixed the problem fast. But no doubt there were
quite a few business owners, webmasters and bloggers who got a
nail-biting taste of what it looks like when the cyber-criminals
successfully manage to get past your security.
(This article excerpted from the Pacific
Coast Informer Blog)
February 4, 2009
Web Threats Weekly is distributed by:
* Pacific Coast Information Systems Ltd.
* Contact PCIS
Toll-free 1.877.744.7558
In this issue:
* Online Threats "Exponentially Greater" Than A Few Years Ago
* Help Beat The Hackers in 2009. Here's How You Can Help
* This Internet May Harm Your Computer
* Hacker Bait
* Mythbusters Tip #11
* Spam-Alot
Web Threats Weekly helps organizations protect themselves and their customers from known online threats.
Resources Links
* PCIS / Boonbox IT Security Resources Page
* Online
Protection: How To Secure Your Business and Build Consumer Trust
(Vancouver Board of Trade)
* Managers' Cheat Sheet For IT Security
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