The Internet pervades both our private and business lives. And along with the undoubted benefits have come a growing number of threats ranging from those that are mainly time wasting, such as spam, or surfing in work time, through to those that can disrupt our IT systems like denial of service attacks and virus-laden email. Add in phishing and the advent of worms and trojans and you have a situation where many businesses are beginning to wonder whether the risks outweigh the benefits.
As in pretty much every walk of life, threats have given rise to the growth of an industry to combat them. From the burglars who fuelled the development of locks, today we have an Internet security industry intent on combating it’s malcontents like script kiddies, hackers and virus writers.
Most manufacturers provide an element of ‘what you see is what you get’ to give comfort to purchasers when they buy general items of software or hardware. Customers then have a pretty good idea that they’ve chosen the right product and that it’s doing the job intended.
Unfortunately with Internet security products, this is not the case. Pity the poor person responsible for IT systems in a small business. Not only is it unrealistic for them to have sufficient specialised knowledge to make the judgement about the equipment they need, but how can they possibly judge whether their choice of equipment is adequately performing the intended tasks. Even large organizations, with IT departments who undoubtedly would have the skills to specify the necessary protection for their infrastructure, are unlikely to have the equipment or the experience to test products for compliance with the specification. For a small business with less skill and expertise to hand, this is doubly difficult.
Generally end-users can seek justice or compensation for the purchase of an inadequate or potentially damaging product or a service through a regulatory body. Its guidelines are often legally enforced and provide an independent check of safety and performance. Thus, electrical equipment, cars and other vehicles, burglar alarms, and the like all have to be independently verified as safe and fit for purpose before sale. Maybe it’s just the speed with which use of the Internet has developed that has resulted in consumer protection falling behind. But today, if you purchase a firewall to protect your business, you often have nothing to rely on other than the claims of the manufacturer that it’s doing what it says on the box. Worse, you’re only going to find out the problems when it’s too late and your confidential information has been accessed and systems disabled.
It’s a high pressure business world and the temptation to create marketing hype that exaggerates a product’s capability is immense. Such overstatements are not limited to the newer and smaller vendors either. The worst examples that I’ve observed have come from the so-called prestigious market leaders who ought to know better.
The good news is that product testing bodies are already with us and they exist to provide that independent validation that users largely cannot get any other way. Checkmark and ICSA Labs are two well known ones and they have the skills and equipment in place to check Internet security products for specification compliance.
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