What are the types of locks you have seen and grown up hearing about? Locks with multiple twists to a giant key, locks that could be operated from both sides, key-less car locks, gear locks, brake locks. You can probably lock everything in your life, including yourself. But how do you lock your computer and internet data, with hackers smartening up with newer technologies.

The threat is indeed real and everyone seems to have woken up to it. As data theft and cyber crimes increase, information technology companies that provide operating systems or security software are working hard to protect the data of their customers. Among them, Google, Cisco, McAfee, Symantec and Trend Micro are working on cloud-based solutions to safeguard data.

According to TrendLabs, Trend Micro’s global network of threat researchers, in the first half of 2010, Europe bypassed North and South Americas and the Asia-Pacific to become the top producer of spam. The threat report from Trend Micro, which offers network antivirus and internet content security software, said spam increased in the first half with a lull in April.

During the period, it said, malicious uniform resource locators (URLs) increased from 1.5 billion in January to over 3.5 billion in June. While North America was the source of most malicious URLs, most victims of malware infections were in Asia-Pacific. The top URLs blocked by Trend Micro were adult websites as well as sites that hosted malicious variants such as IFRAME code, TROJ_AGENT and JS_DLOADR.ATF.

The number is increasing and TrendLabs handles around 2,50,000 samples each day. According to some recent estimates, more then 60,000 unique new malware samples were introduced in a day.

There is a common perception that porn is the hub of spam but that is not true. “Porn consists of only four per cent of all spam. Commercial, health and medical categories make up 65 per cent of the spam generated throughout the world, with HTML spam being the most commonly used technique,” said Amit Nath, country manager of Trend Micro in India and Saarc.

Nath said India and Brazil had the largest number of computers infected by bots, tools of choice of cyber criminals who build botnets to distribute malware, attack and send spam. These botnet herders earn millions of dollars a year by stealing from innocent computer users.

To block such herders, Trend Micro recently released a software, Titanium 2011, which gathers and analyses threat data and stops viruses, spyware and phishing attacks from reaching the PC “in the cloud”.

Some companies now offer virtual machines, based in the cloud, to protect data. “Over a period of time, virtualisation, storage, servers and networks have grown parallel through consolidations, but in their own domains. Therefore, security has become the topmost concern of every company and we have launched virtual machines such as VN-link and Nexus 1000V, which is software embedded in the data centre. These machines in the cloud are totally isolated from each other, so that a customer’s data is safe seamlessly,” said Sumit Mukhija, Cisco Systems’ regional manager of data-centre sales in India and Saarc.

Cisco’s VN-link is an approach to provide an end-to-end network solution to meet the new requirements created by server virtualisation. It introduces a new set of features and capabilities that enable virtual machine interfaces to be individually identified, configured, monitored, migrated and diagnosed in a way that is consistent with current network operation models.

The Nexus 1000V series is the first example of third-party distributed virtual switches that are fully integrated with VMware virtual infrastructure, including VMware vCenter for the virtualisation administrator. They not only maintain the virtualisation administrator's regular workflow but also offload vSwitch and port group configuration to the network administrator, reducing network configuration mistakes and helping ensure that consistent network policy is enforced throughout the data centre.

Apart from Cisco, companies such as Google and McAfee are also working on web 2.0 software to enable faster communication between users without losing data by keeping information in service providers’ servers.

Amit Singh, Google’s vice-president of international sales – enterprise, said, “Through such technologies, customers from enterprises can interact and work together at the same time without worrying about data loss. Every time a presentation is made, it is automatically saved on the server.”

At present, web 2.0 is mostly adopted by private enterprises and not by government agencies. That is a cause for concern, because governments face greater challenges to data safety.

“The government has not yet leveraged to web 2.0, but this is a medium to reach out to the markets quickly and as we grow it would also multiply with use of more mobile phones, notebooks and tablet PCs. Small and medium enterprises are using it as they thought it is easier and safer to use,” said Ambareesh Deshpande, director of McAfee India.

Some of the other technologies used to prevent cyber crime include Symantec’s Sonar, which relies on the context of the threats rather than the content and use the telling behavioural characteristics and distribution nature to detect them.

According to the research done by Mocana, a technology company, the use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets is growing at an unprecedented pace. This creates complex security and management challenges for three key groups: IT organisations, consumers and communication service providers.

Mocana’s findings indicate that, for 65 per cent of enterprises, attacks against smart mobile devices require the regular attention of IT staff. Therefore, enterprises looking to address these challenges will have to adopt new models, such as security in the cloud, for solutions that will work seamlessly across platforms and devices.