Beware the online tricksters

Hallowe'en is trick or treat time for hackers too.

By the middle of this week, scores of kids high on sugar will be let out onto the evening streets for Hallowe'en.

Once celebrated in the Celtic calendar as the last day of the year, the night of 31 October was when "all the witches and warlocks were abroad", according to Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

Nowadays, the homogenising influence of the US has reinvented the night as a kind of carte blanche for youngsters to scare the hell out of old people.

For me this is always a worrying ordeal, especially in Shepherd's Bush, where a 'trick' could range from a drive-by shooting to something indelible being painted on your property.

On the internet, a 'trick' played by a mischievous hacker could also be serious.

While most hacking is centred around apparently innocuous attacks that appear to do little but cause a nuisance, they still take valuable time to fix and can cost millions in productivity downtime.

It is the professional attacks that are the real ones to fear. These usually coincide with times when there is lots of hacker activity and the attacker feels relatively safe and anonymous.

You don't often hear about these attacks because, when a company finds out about them, it's too late and the damage is done. Firms often don't want to disclose the fact that they have fallen victim to a serious attack.

Although security has been a hot topic for resellers over the past few years, end users remain vulnerable as they are perhaps unaware of the issues. So there is a huge opportunity for value-added resellers to cash in.