Robert Herjavec can remember selling the first commercial firewall in Canada.
The year was 1990, and the technology was simple. In essence: allow or deny. Those were the security functions afforded to businesses trying to protect their networks two decades ago, when many companies hadn't even heard of the Internet.
Craig Sjodin - © ABC - Courtesy: Everett Collection
"At the time, business started taking off and I thought, 'Okay, great, we'll get a good 2-3 year run out of this and that will be it,'" remembers Herjavec, the "Dragon's Den" star that made his fortune in computer security.
Twenty years later, Herjavec is still selling web protection under his company, The Herjavec Group, which now services the security needs of many of Canada's top corporate names. In that regard, the Dragon may have outlasted his future in the industry as predicted back in 1990. But in fact, Herjavec may be presiding now over a time of unprecedented chaos for web security.
Look under any recent tech headline and what's the one you word you see, over and over? "Hack."
Over a period stretching more than six months, the world's computer hackers have run rampant, targeting the biggest, most valuable brands for their attacks.
And one by one, the names have fallen like dominoes, a who's who of modern casualties.
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Since December of last year, Visa, MasterCard, Lockheed Martin, PBS, Honda and Sony, among others, have had their networks, databases or websites targeted and compromised under high-profile circumstances. Even during the preparation of this feature, Nintendo, Citigroup and the Conservative Party of Canada were famously breached. Most notably, scammers from the hacking group The Lulz Raft altered the Tories' website to suggest, falsely, that Prime Minister Stephen Harper had been rushed to hospital after choking on his hash brown breakfast.
It may seem like a harmless plot by the hackers - flex your computer smarts by ridiculing a high-ranking, oft-criticized public figure; no harm done - but the threat being posed is increasing in malice.
While hackers still target valuable data, like credit card and other banking information that can translate into illicit financial gain, several industry experts contacted by MSN say they have noticed a major uptick in recent computer attacks backed by political motives.
In the cases of Visa and MasterCard's attacks, for instance, hackers appeared to target the credit card giants for their public shunning of WikiLeaks, the much-maligned whistleblower forum that has become a political lightning rod. Visa and MasterCard made a stance against WikiLeaks in December, halting the processing of any donations to the site through their operations, and paid the price. Both of their websites were temporarily shuttered by hackers claiming allegiance to WikiLeaks, who targeted the credit card companies ("Operation Payback," they called it) in the busy weeks leading up to Christmas.
