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A large number of cross-industry business executives and international government officials are expected to attend the World Information Technology and Services Alliance's (WITSA) Infosec Global Summit to be held in Belfast's Waterfront Hall on 31 May and 1 June, 2001.
The initiative follows a growing number of on-line banking, e-business security breaches and attacks on high profile Web sites including Yahoo and CNN.
Welcoming the Federation's success in bringing the event to Northern Ireland, Enterprise, Trade and Investment Minister, Sir Reg Empey MLA, described cybercrime as one of the biggest challenges facing new digital economies around the world.
"For many companies, IT networks are fundamental to their businesses. As IT becomes increasingly widespread and sophisticated, however, there is growing unease about the security of on-line financial transactions and the risks of fraud, virus infection, and unauthorised penetration," said Sir Empey.
"We believe Belfast will provide a vibrant location for international business executives, technologists and policy leaders to come together to learn about trends and developments in information security and to share best practices, programmes, ideas and opinions," said WITSA President, Harris Miller.
Earlier this year, Miller was one of a number of Internet industry leaders who discussed the subject at a high level meeting with President Clinton following a series of orchestrated attacks on leading American Web sites.
The Belfast event, hosted by the Northern Ireland Software Industry Federation (SIF), will review work undertaken by working groups set up at the Washington DC Summit in October to look at areas such as best practice, workforce education, R&D, cybercrime and law enforcement and public policy.
Meanwhile in the US, the FBI's cybercrime unit has warned Web users to be vigilant during the Christmas holidays. The beginning of last year was marked by a number of "denial of service attacks" which temporarily shut down leading sites such as Amazon, eBay and Yahoo. The NIPC says that the software used by hackers last year to flood the servers of targeted Web sites with debilitating amounts of hoax traffic is now in far wider circulation.
November saw the emergence of a new, potentially dangerous computer virus that is spreading across computer systems world-wide. The TROJ-Shockwave virus - also dubbed I.worm.Prolin - sends an e-mail attachment which purports to be "a great Shockwave flash movie" but in fact scans and renames data stored on disk drives if opened.
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