THE MAINLAND IS poised to undergo a revolution in the way domestic organisations approach information security in the next 18 months to two years, according to a security executive.
Paul Serrano, Asia Pacific marketing director for CipherTrust, said he expected to see legislation introduced that would require organisations to ensure a certain level of security, backed up by education programmes.
'There'll be an 18-month quest to educate everyone on the depth of the problem,' he said.
The mainland is lagging behind much of Asia in its adoption of information security.
CipherTrust, which specialises in messaging security, last month released an analysis of actual e-mail messages collected from companies worldwide using IronMail, the company's messaging security software.
The study found that 20 per cent of the 157,000 hacked servers identified daily were on the mainland. Hacked servers, or zombies, are typically infected by a computer virus or worm without the owner's knowledge.
These servers await instructions from operators of zombie networks. Instructions range from sending spam to phishing, to launching denial of service attacks, where a targeted company's website or mail server is bombarded with fake traffic, effectively shutting down the system to legitimate users.