Worldwide business is also faced with another smaller, but no less destructive threat. The anti-capitalism demonstrations seen in the City in June, and two weeks ago at the recent World Trade Organisation conference in Seattle, are prime examples of how growing movements of technically aware protesters are organising their efforts to attack financial institutions, both physically and electronically. Further protests are planned for January, and the millennium bug again represents a means to explain away suspicious-looking and damaging activities identified within a computer network. Repeated failed logins and reported breeches can be caused by Year 2000 created errors, and so the risk exists that real breaches will be brushed off just as easily. Then there are viruses.
Nothing can appear more like a software glitch than the effects of a virus.
Activity among virus creators has increased in the last three months, and anti-virus developers are already bracing themselves for a flood of new viruses in the New Year. Given how little time is left before the big day, it is highly unlikely that you will be able to implement new software or hardware initiatives, but the chances are you won't need to. You should concentrate on implementing already agreed security policies and cleaning up your outstanding user administration. This means purging your redundant temporary staff and contractor user accounts, hunting out and removing any rogue modems connected to workstations, and examining security and access privileges to remove system-level access from anyone who should not have it. This will leave your systems in a good position to repel any internal denial of service attacks.