It will take more than a spoon to crack this egg!

Whether you’ve had your Paypal abused, credit details stolen, logged into Facebook only to see a few naughty statements made in your name or whether you’ve electronically been pronounced dead sixteen times - we’ve all been touched by cybercrime.

We hear about it all the time: Online retailer Play.com recently reported that some of their customers’ personal data may have been compromised, and that their users might be sent spam e-mails containing harmful links. TripAdvisor users’ email accounts have been hacked in to during March. Millions of people were at an increased risk of email phishing after a giant security breach at Epsilon, which is having an effect on some of the USA’s largest concerns, such as JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, and Walgreens.

Our lives are becoming entwined with technology. Often we are forfeiting security and placing our privacy in jeopardy, all for the sake of speed and convenience. Electronic villains have had a rampant turkey-shoot at online users, almost nearly all the way back to the days of the abacus.

As long as there is a channel and a means, there will always be a certain amount of associated illicit behaviour: more or less guaranteeing that your granny will consistently be on the back foot, shielding her life savings from a kid learning how to hack mailing lists from knitting sites out of his room in Vodka-oozing Vladivostok.

But some brave companies are standing strong. GraphicMail, a web-hosted self-service email marketing provider dedicated to helping small businesses and organizations, has tightened its security once again, after serious new breaches in the email industry. The first quarter of 2011 has seen a surge of severe electronic security breaches via email marketing, and only the best measurements possible will stave off these consumer assaults.

With an infrastructure that is designed to protect clients’ sensitive personal data, all efforts are made to ensure that no person or entity other than the owner of the data can access it.

Speaking passionately about this cringing subject, Ernie Retief, CTO at GraphicMail says: “By using SQL server security together with IP restricted access, our data is secure. What this means is even if you have all the information about our setup, with all the database passwords, you won’t have access if you’re not on the correct IP address. “

This is accomplished by their top of the range Cisco routers and firewalls. Cisco is the industry leader in network speed, security and reliability. So all the holes are covered by Cisco-certified superheroes.

CTO Ernie elaborates: “Our application is also written with malicious attacks in mind. We use external companies to conduct monthly attacks on our code to look for any loopholes. We also undergo a network audit every few months to make sure our security is in order.”