Protect your business from online fraud

Online business offers numerous benefits, but also opens up a range of online fraud risks. Here are some of the dangers of online business and the security measures to protect your business effectively and affordably.

Problems such as computer viruses, spam emails, identity theft and online fraud get frequent and lurid coverage in the mainstream media, leading many businesses to question whether the effort of getting connected to the internet is worth the trouble. While the risks are real, dealing with the problems can offer benefits beyond the obvious one of peace of mind, as Martin Lack discovered.

Lack is the founder and director of Martin Lack & Associates, a Queensland-based company specialising in events management for the IT sector. While the firm has just five full-time staff, the nature of its business means that it is a highly visible target.

"We're a completely electronic business," Lack says. "Because we have a very high profile on the web, we get a lot of junk mail." As well as being a nuisance, such spam mail is also increasingly used as a means of distributing dangerous code (often known as malware), either by attaching it to the mail or by including links to sites that can silently take over an individual computer.

Drawing partly on knowledge gained from co-ordinating national computer security conferences, ML&A took a multi-tiered approach to dealing with the potential for problems. "We've always had pretty tight anti-virus stuff on our machines, but we knew from our experience that it's better to have several people stopping it rather than one," Lack says. "They're going to pick up a different type of nasty."

Most recently, ML&A implanted MessageLabs' eponymous solution, which filters all incoming email before it is delivered to the company. Messages identified as either spam or containing malware are automatically held back by MessageLabs, rather than being delivered. This minimises the amount of junk mail to be processed by users and also drastically reduces the overall volume of mail sent, as well as providing an additional level of security.

"It's all about managing risk and reducing cost," Lack says. The company can access the held-back mail if it believes that legitimate messages have accidentally been filtered out, though this hasn't surfaced as a problem to date.

Aside from the security improvements, an equally big benefit was the time saved in deleting junk mails from staff machines, a task which Lack used to spend half an hour or more on every single morning. "You don't realise until you do it what impact all that junk mail is having on you," he says.

Ensuring continuity of access is also a major focus for Lack. "We were always very cautious about the things that would cause our business to stop dead. In Brisbane we had big power issues a few years ago, so we put in a generator just in case. But something that isn't necessarily obvious is that if our internet service provider went down, we would have no email for at least 48 hours until we could transfer our domain name to another provider. Because MessageLabs now intercepts all of our mail, that transfer would be much faster if we needed it."

As ML&A's experience demonstrates, protecting a business requires more than just a simple anti-virus solution (though you will need one of those as a basic component of your security system). While computer security threats used to be easily identifiable, the biggest challenge for most businesses today is so-called blended threats, which use a variety of mechanisms (such as email, websites, social engineering, and virus attacks) to distribute themselves. And while historically well-known viruses often tried to draw attention to themselves, modern malware wants to stay invisible.