In the past few weeks our security monitoring team has noticed an escalation of brute force attacks against websites throughout New Zealand and Australia.

In most cases the attacks are simplistic brute force login attempts, with few successes.

However, most New Zealand companies remain fairly naive to the significant level of industrial espionage and hacker attacks now occurring.

The most recent examples come from China, which is basically siphoning ALL content from EVERY new website registered in New Zealand and Australia for intelligence, and commercial purposes.

The next most frequent attacks are coming from locations including Germany, where hackers are attempting to break into websites, often for no specific useful purpose.

We would like to ask EVERY WEB MASTER in New Zealand and Australia to consider the fact that you can easily reduce these attacks by simple steps:

1. Check your server logs for attempted attacks (you will see repeatedly the same IP addresses trying to login or extract numerous webpages).

2. Use a tool such as http://www.ip2location.com/free.asp to identify and detail the IP address origin to identify the offending country.

3. Use the tools found on http://www.countryipblocks.net/ (right hand side of their webpage) to select a country and create a new .htacess deny list of IP addresses.

4. Save the new .htaccess file, which denies access to specific country blocks, to every one of your primary httpd folders/directories. This will effectively block out all countries attempting to hack attack.

If people are offended or feel rejected for your more broad ranging denial of access, remind them that as people living in that country it is their responsibility to encourage their leaders NOT to encourage or support internet hacking.