Governments, criminal gangs, and gifted amateurs are
seeding cyberspace with Trojans, viruses and other malware to
monitor activity and benefit economically.
"Every day we are seeing attacks, and I am not sure if this is
just the tip of the iceberg," Gil Schwed, the founder and CEO of
Check Point, the security
software and appliance firm, told Computer Weekly.
Schwed was referring to recent
media reports that the Pentagon, the German government, and
Western corporate sites had been attacked from China.
"We are seeing a lot of bad things. There are many attacks and
some are not repeated. At least we think they are not repeated," he
said.
Schwed's comments were backed up by a
report commissioned by online security supplier Garlik to
estimate the prevalence of online crimes. It found nearly two
million incidents of sexual harrassment, 850,000 sex crimes,
207,000 financial frauds, 92,000 ID thefts and nearly 150,000 PC
hacks.
Schwed argued that governments should resist calls to make
software developers and users liable for damages and compensation
from security errors and breaches. It would stifle innovation and
reduce risk-taking by entrepreneurs and investors.
He said if it happened, software development would become like
drug development - expensive, risk-averse, restricted to a few
companies, and produce products mainly for the rich. "I do not
think that is their intention," he said.
Schwed was speaking at the firm's annual event for its European
customers at which he outlined the company's response to what he
described as increasingly professional, secret and criminal attacks
on government, corporate and personal computer systems.
He said that that as companies looked increasingly to use
networks to communicate with customers and business partners they
were having to look more deeply into the content of messages as
well as their source and integrity.
As a result, they were placing a premium on performance both in
terms of speed and effectiveness of the security products they
used. This lay behind Check Point's collaboration with Intel and
Nokia to develop appliances that can detect and stop malware at
speeds greater than a gigabit per second.
The need to protect against the increasing mobility of staff and
careless and culpable leakage of information prompted Check Point
to acquire the Danish end point security firm Pointsec in January.
Schwed said he expected Pointsec to increase sales from £35m last
year to £50m this year.
This would be driven partly by the US federal government's
insistence that all its disk drives be encrypted, and a growing
awareness of the need to protect data at all stages.
Outlining the company's product strategy, Schwed said his aim
was to have Check Point as the only pure play security software
firm. This was a reference to its main competitors, Cisco and
Juniper Networks, which entered the security market on the back of
their network servers.
Schwed said customer demand had failed to draw Check Point into
the market for identity management and authentication systems, and
was unlikely to do so in the near future. "There is plenty of space
in the network and data protection markets for the company to
expand into," he said.