It is 1994, a Russian hacker named Vladimir Levin and a group of accomplices are siting at a desk of a computer office somewhere in St. Petersburg. There, Levin electronically transfers $11 million from Citibank's New York-based mainframes to Finland, Israel, and California. This all occurred under the watch of one of Citibank's top information officers in charge of security, Colin Crook. This frightening occurrence is not a rare event; many businesses are finding that their computer system's security is being bypassed and that their private files are being invaded. As Businesses begin to rely more heavily on the Internet for information exchange and sales, these events are only likely to increase.
Just a few companies which have fallen victim to these malevolent hackers are AOL, Boeing, Intel, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, and ironically enough the Pentagon which just a few decades early had made the Internet for military use. In a recent survey of Corporations, it was found that these Businesses are not alone and that approximately 53% of 428 U.S. Corporations fell victims to viruses and 42% had had some unauthorized use of their systems. (These figures may also be small due to the fact that some Corporations do not want information about their company's files being intruded upon because it could cause some uneasiness in their clients and stockholders). It is also estimated that the cost to U.S. corporations each year exceeds $63 billion and that one-half of these attacks comes from the outside, normally through the Internet.
Companies like the Bank of Montreal, Toronto Dominion, Master Card, and Visa .
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who wish to take advantages of the Internet and their clients and potential clients who would use the services provided by these companies must do to something to aid in the defense of their files. It is literally warfare. "We need the equivalent of the Manhattan Project to help us harden our data infrastructures against attack,"" says U.
