Hackers manage to successfully break into systems much more often than you might realise. Just ask any member of a penetration testing team. These people hack for a living, with the explicit permission of the companies whose systems they are targeting, in order to highlight weaknesses. And in around three quarters of all cases, they manage to break through even the most secure e-commerce sites and firewalls.

Criminals, too, are finding that hacking is getting easier as more companies move their business onto the Web. Not always because the systems are using inadequate protection systems, but because the designers and programmers have made basic, fundamental mistakes. And such mistakes can cost companies dearly. If someone lowered the prices in your online product catalogue, how quickly would you notice? Or if someone raised them, and orders stopped coming in, how soon would you make the connection?

Remember the Microsoft Hotmail hack from a couple of years ago, when someone discovered just how easy it could be to access the mailbox of any Hotmail user? Just include details of that user's account on the end of the hotmail.com URL and the system would divulge their details without thinking to ask for an ID or password.


Bringing a commercial Website to its knees is often no more difficult than running a freely-downloadable (and free!) hacking tool, then typing in the URL address of the Web server and watching as it crashes because of a default settings and configurations.

Keeping your Web-based business secure in today's hacker-ridden internet means more than installing traditional network firewalls and intrusion detection, neither of which will detect or prevent the type of attacks mentioned above. You also need to ensure that the program code which drives your Web site is bug-free and, most critical of all, designed with security in mind from the start. Hackers know all the tricks, so you can't hope to keep your system safe unless you know them too. Or unless you can find a way to automatically scan your application for known programming faults.

For example, financial institutions that allow their customers to execute money transfers or to apply other changes to their private bank accounts should make sure that Web application will not allow a hacker to do the same from his browser. Insurance companies that allow customers to purchase policies or adjust them to their needs should be extra cautious to hackers buying an insurance policy for accidents that have already occurred by starting a new policy with a retrospective start date before the accident occurred.