Second, broken hard disks represent additional challenges since we cannot then use their own systems to destroy data. For these hard disks, we bring them back to our secure head office location ourselves (ie. in our own van, with our own background-checked rack engineer) and store them until we have 20 or so. That can take up to a few months. Once we have 20 our hard drive destruction supplier comes to our offices and we observe them as they put the hard disk drives into what is essentially a giant industrial shredder. The disks and their magnetic platters are all reduced to small fragments, from which data recovery would be impossible.

Personnel / 'purchase key' attacks

The biggest security weak-point for any organisation is its people. A determined attacker will not bother with trying to steal servers nor hack into them, but will attempt to gain leverage over key members of staff; the "purchase key attack". How much is your information worth to your competitors? Enough to warrant them filling a manilla envelope with £50 notes and whispering in the ear of an employee with privileged access, or worse still trying to gain leverage over them via threats to a loved one? Quite possibly.

We take such threats very seriously, and undertake a number of steps to ensure that our customers are not vulnerable to such attacks:

1. All staff are CRB & background checked.
   
   
2. Only our systems administrators have access to customer servers.
   
   
3. Access to customer servers is gained via personal keys, and all access is logged.
   
   
4. Logs and activity are routinely checked by our head of security.
   
   
5. Organisational separation of those who have physical access to servers, and those who know what is on the servers (see above).
   
   

Our head of security is obviously in a privileged position. They have additional levels of security check, and are monitored closely by Kate & Nick (the executive directors). Further, we do not disclose their identity.

Denial of service attacks

This is the most common form of attack is a simple attempt to disable a Web site (or other service) by flooding it with requests. This does not pose a threat to information security, but there have been reports of groups deliberately overloading Web sites (especially gambling ones with high daily revenues) and demanding money to prevent it happening again; a literal online protection racket.

We provide a layer of defence against DOS attacks; our firewall automatically detects incoming traffic that looks abnormal and starts ignoring traffic from that IP address. We call that the "DOS squasher".

In the case of a highly determined attacker, there will be multiple sources for the attack. In case you ever wonder what people write viruses for, this is one of the reasons; the viruses recruit the infected personal computer into what is termed a "bot net" - a distributed network of PCs (and sometimes servers) which are under the control of the attacker. They can then send out a message instructing the bot net to launch a distributed attack (a DDOS) which floods the target server with requests from all around the globe.

While our DOS-squasher can kill off several attacking IPs per second, if faced by a major-leage bot net it would be overrun, and even then if an attack managed to max-out that data centre's uplink (at least one gigabit per second, so given an average home connection can do 300kbps upload a bot net of 3,000 might do it) we have to drop the target (victim's) IP address in order to protect other customers.

However, in this instance our multi-location architecture provides protection (see below - we have multiple data centre providers with independent uplinks). If you, the customer, are taking advantage of our multi-site clustering, the bot net would have to launch multi-gigabit attacks against multiple locations in order to actually overload all of them. Such an attack would be on a level such that the police or even GCHQ would likely get involved.