It should absolutely terrify you that in South Africa this year, locally-focused web attacks have reached an all-time high.

I mean, remember the days when it was just clicking links on dodgy websites, opening spam emails, or weird downloads from LimeWire that held an impending threat to your PC.

Now, it’s so much heavier than that.

You see, more and more companies are moving their services and customer interaction functions online which is only fuelling web attacks, defacements, and malicious infections of websites.

Although these attacks are generally aimed at online retail stores and client interactive portals, they can hit smaller sites, too.

(Like your daily mommy blog.)

Sure, you can employ the services of your local tech dude to help you out, but the pros over at NEWORDER have formulated a whole service called HAXED, which is dedicated to serving as a counter-measure against these types of threats.

Marthinus Engelbrecht, CEO of the risk management and information security service, spoke to ITWeb to explain the service:

There has been a significant rise in defacements targeted at local domains this year. As a security company operating in the South African space, we believe it important to offer companies a protective solution against this type of attack method, as they continue to increase in popularity.

The HAXED platform is so much more robust than the simple up-time monitoring services currently offered by the industry, and is the only technology of its kind to accurately identify when Web content has been changed, altered or added to a web site.

Companies need to understand that web defacements are not always simply that – very often the perpetrator changes the web content and artwork merely to serve as a distraction from his bigger goal, which is to upload malware for the purpose of harvesting and stealing information, re-directing traffic or conducting full-blown industrial espionage.

And these types of web compromises have much more severe consequences than just reputational damage.

The platform monitors whether a website has been defaced while also offering a service that identifies acts of vandalism and domain hijacking.

That way, you will immediately know when something goes wrong.

Cue collective sigh of relief – now get on it.

[source: itweb]