Business today is characterized by the tremendous amount of information being passed through the public Internet. More businesses, and even governments, are turning to this method in order to streamline operations and create greater efficiency. Many businesses have in fact become dependant on Internet transfers, often using it to pass sensitive information to and from remote offices. But the problem, says Vipin Nair, President of HCL Comnet, is that the “majority of companies…are not aware that somewhere, someone is spying on them.” As businesses and governments increasingly rely on the Internet to pass confidential information, they are waking up to the fact that once such sensitive data is on the net it can be accessed by anyone – a competitor or even an enemy.

Yet despite the growing list of horror stories about costly computer break-ins, many companies have still not installed the most basic defenses. Even the U.S. Government is not immune, as a group of computer hackers calling themselves the “Masters of Downloading” broke into the U.S. Defense Information Systems Network (DISN), and accessed information about the U.S. network of Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites which are used to pinpoint missile strikes and guide troops. A recent study shows that of 2200 Web sites surveyed, 70 to 80% had serious security flaws, which made them easy targets for hackers.

Janet Reno, U.S. Attorney General, calls cybercrime the “new frontier of crime,” and studies released by the Computer Security Institute indicate that computer intrusions and cybercrime in 1997 were up 36% from 1996 levels, for a total of $135 million in loses to companies of all types and sizes.

While security break-ins coming from the outside of an organization are a growing concern, the true threat is actually from the inside. Sources state that the percentage of security leaks occurring from within account for over 70% of all security breaches. Intranet security is notorious for being too loose, and companies are now reporting fiscal losses running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars due to leaks of proprietary information. According to our figures, in every major industry that we have investigated, incidents of employee access abuse far surpass access abuse by outsiders.

As the security problem grows, the computer industry is responding by developing a variety of increasingly sophisticated security products. One such technology is Public Key Infrastructure, or PKI. This is a system that uses different Internet registration authorities to verify and authenticate the validity of each party involved in an Internet transaction, thus eliminating the possibility of computer fraud.

Another cutting-edge security feature is S/MIME, which is short for Secure/ Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. This is a way to encode messages, graphics and audio so that they can be sent over the Internet allowing only the sender and receiver to understand the message. SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, is a similar technology that not only encodes data sent over the Internet, but also assures that the data is sent directly from source to destination, without stopping at a middle-point such as a server.

At Anyware Technology, Inc. we are focused entirely on creating Internet security solutions. Concerned with this growing problem, the team at Anyware Technology has developed a line of software-based products known as EverLink, which incorporates a wide array of advanced security features. Other technologies in EverLink include Digital Certification, Intrusion Locks, and Encryption levels as high as 168 bit.

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