Faced with the various dangers of new technologies, the great majority of European companies have set in place (as a minimum) computer security tools, and (as a maximum) computer security plans. We all remember the great waves of computer viruses of the 1990s, and the more or less direct effects that they had on the functioning of various economies. These incidents were well covered by the generalist media; there was an important educative impact on economic decision-makers, and the leaders of industry are now well aware of the importance of the overall reliability of their computing tools.

Security investment can now amount to more than ten per cent of overall technology cost, depending on the size of the company, the sector of activity, and their dependence on IT tools. The growth of this spending on tools and security services is one of the strongest in the computer industry, generating fortunes for those involved. This wealth seems to be equally spread between capital repayment, research and customer support. The intensity of research, particularly when facing up to new threats, is marked; for instance, most of the publishers who sell perimeter security solutions (anti-virus, anti-spam, etc.) regularly generate upwards of one hundred daily updates for each of their products.

All home users have come to roughly the same conclusion. This is that the explosive growth of domestic computer equipment, combined with the simultaneous expansion of competitively priced wideband Internet access, has multiplied both vulnerabilities and security incidents. Successive waves of viruses long relied on the ignorance and naivety of users. Auto-replicating viruses colonised millions of e-mail addresses in order to both reproduce and broadcast themselves to an infinite degree, leading to blockages to both networks and individual machines. There, too, the overall message has been received; the market penetration of basic computer security tools is significant. Whether in the office or the home, it has now become the norm to activate a security suite for protection against virus and other attacks, even if the whole population has yet to be covered by both information and the relevant techniques . . .