Brace Yourself for the Beijing Olympics - Page 2

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The real impact may be felt by corporations as their staff access videos on the Web. "Most businesses have some online applications employees use as a critical part of the workday, and that's where they could be materially affected," Eric Lundbohm, vice president of marketing at Internet security and insider threat management provider 8e6 Technologies told InternetNews.com.

"For us, Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) is mission-critical, and if a large number of people in the company are doing streaming videos through our gateway and eating up our bandwidth, response time for Salesforce.com will be slower," Lundbohm added. "On top of that, there's the loss of productivity when people watch these videos."

Lundbohm suggests that businesses create acceptable use policies as soon as possible. "You could shut access off completely, but that would backfire," he said. He suggests letting employees watch the games but warning them that they will be monitored and their managers will be notified if they spend more than a fixed amount of time daily on this.

What's worse, NBCOlympics.com has signed a deal with online marketing specialists Lyris to distribute alerts and real time updates by e-mail to people who sign up for this service. "They'll be sending out literally millions of e-mails on this system over two weeks," Blaine Mathieu, Lyris's chief marketing officer, told InternetNews.com.

Not only will that open up an enterprise's IT system to spam and fake e-mails, it could also flood the corporate wide-area network (WAN) .

Other cybercriminal attacks will take the form of faking Web sites that will have the look and feel of NBCOlympics.com Web sites to lure victims in and download backdoors, Trojan horses, sniffers and other malware onto their computers, warned Ryan C. Barnett, director of Web application security at Breach Security. He suggests enterprises update their browsers and patches.

And then there's security concerns

There is also a security risk, as malware writers try to capitalize on the public's interest in the Games. "Bad guys with spamming and phishing e-mails are always monitoring anything that will trigger a traffic spike," Barnett told InternetNews.com. "The Olympics will be a perfect lure for them."

Enterprises also have to watch out for search engine optimization (SEO) attacks. "If you go to your favorite site, say Google, and type in a request like Olympic streaming video, you may get what looks like a legitimate Olympic site but isn't," Derek Manky, a security researcher at unified threat management systems vendor Fortinet told InternetNews.com.

Cybercriminals could use such a site to inject malicious code into their victims' systems. The solution to this is layered protection. "You'll need a policy to block streaming, perhaps, and antivirus layered on top of it to filter out the malware," Manky said.

Overall, enterprises should take three steps to safeguard themselves from the potential madness of the games. "First, communicate what you mean by acceptable use in business," Chris Simmons, director of product strategy at Fortinet, told InternetNews.com.

"Then, install some sort of filtering safeguards like Web filters to enforce that policy," Simmons said. "Finally, layer on security measures for better protection."

One other thing a business should do in advance is talk to its Internet Service Provider (ISP). "Verify with your ISP how much bandwidth is allocated for your site, and make sure that the contract says you shouldn't have to pay as much if the levels go below that," Breach Security's Barnett said.