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354 Part Two Information Technology Infrastructure
INTERACTIVE SESSION: TECHNOLOGY
MWEB BUSINESS: HACKED
MWEB, launched in 1997, became South Africa’s • High-speed antivirus/antispyware software with
leading ISP in 1998. It has established itself as a automatic updates
company that provides a cutting-edge network and • An enhanced firewall
service infrastructure and outstanding customer ser- In addition, MWEB automatically protects custom-
vice. Currently, MWEB’s customer base of 320,000 ers against junk email and viruses that are sent via
includes home users; small, medium, and large email. Its virus filter ensures that only virus-free
business customers; and corporate clients. MWEB email is delivered to clients’ inboxes by automatically
won the ISP of the Year award at the MyBroadband cleaning e-mails from recognized malware sources.
Conference in Johannesburg in 2010. The award was MWEB advises its customers to keep their ADSL
based on the performance of its various broadband connections safe from bandwidth theft and account
services as well as on customer satisfaction. abuse by blocking unsolicited incoming connections
Its business division, MWEB Business, was to network ports commonly used by hackers.
founded in January 1998. MWEB Business prides Despite the multitude of security services offered
itself as being a business partner that is perfectly by MWEB, a number of MWEB Business subscribers’
positioned to leverage the power of Web-based account details were compromised when their logon
technologies in all areas of an organization. MWEB and password details were published on the Internet
Business helps companies: by hackers. Initial reports indicated that as many as
• Manage business data in ways that add real 2,390 users of MWEB’s business digital subscriber
value and insight to their operations lines were affected. The company disclosed the
• Integrate existing systems with the Internet so security breach on October 25, 2010. It appears that
as to close the gap between technology, strategy, hackers gained access to the Internet Solutions’ self-
and the organization’s bottom line service management system that MWEB Business
• Develop, manage, and maintain solutions that uses to provide and manage business accounts that
include all aspects of Internet connectivity, Web have not yet been migrated to the MWEB network.
site development and hosting, broadband and Historically, MWEB Business was a reseller of
wireless applications, e-commerce, and consult- Internet Solutions’ Uncapped & Fixed IP ADSL
tancy services services, which were provisioned and managed by
• Manage internal information among employees, MWEB using a Web-based management interface pro-
as well as among business partners and suppli- vided by Internet Solutions. All new Business ADSL
ers services provided after April 2010, as well as the bulk
MWEB has moved forward in publicizing its plans of legacy services already migrated, used MWEB’s
for the South African Internet market. According internal authentication systems, which were com-
to MWEB CEO Rudi Jansen, the company needs to pletely unaffected by this incident.
improve the quality of their network, which is not MWEB responded quickly to the hacking inci-
only an MWEB problem, but also a Telkom network dent. According to Jansen, about 1,000 clients on the
problem. Despite having a less-than-ideal network Internet Solutions network needed to be migrated
infrastructure, MWEB uses AVG Internet Security to from the old server which was attacked by hackers.
offer its customers the best possible security while Although the network was quickly secured, most
online. AVG Internet Security offers MWEB custom- customers had recently been moved to MWEB’s IPC
ers the following features: network. MWEB would also be contacting these cus-
• Identity protection for safe banking and shop- tomers to reset their passwords, as an added security
ping measure. Jansen was quick to note that no personal
• LinkScanner for safe surfing and searching information was lost and that none of MWEB’s cli-
• WebShield for safe social networking, chatting, ents suffered any losses as their usernames and pass-
and downloading words had been recreated and changed. He further
• Antiphishing and antispam for a safe unclut- added that MWEB successfully repels 5,000 attacks a
tered inbox day.
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