It's been a very difficult 30 or so days for technology giant Sony. After suffering wave upon wave of digital attacks, stories of gamers trading in their PlayStation consoles for Microsoft's Xbox 360 machine and fresh reports about a ?2bn loss for the financial year, you'd be forgiven for shedding a solitary tear for the firm.

When the first unauthorised activity was detected in their networks on Tuesday April 19, nobody could have predicted that Sony and its subsidiaries would still be under attack from malicious hackers in the present day. Contacting the FBI, pointing the finger at hacktivist collective Anonymous and weeks of downtime to the Playstation Network are just some of the way Sony has tried to deal with the threat, alienating some of their target market in the process.

So, what can small to medium businesses learn from the attacks on Sony? Well, one bit of advice would be to stay medium-sized. Super corporations can become the focus of unrepentant attacks from radical liberal hackers that don't agree with the corporations policies or practices. As a household name in almost every country on earth, a company the size of Sony will not be able to have a Technical Support that will run a 100 per cent secure presence, even more so now that a Sony attack is popular within the hacker community.

However, small-to-medium firms can employ various methods of security of prop their network support Gloucestershire to Germany, City of London to California, Los Angeles to Liverpool - appropriate network security should protect valuable information from virus threats, malware and small attacks.

Now that Sony has been confirmed as a target for the hacker community, it's slowly becoming a case of how much lower Sony can go rather than how can Sony recover. It's incredibly sad to kick someone when they're down. Sony's future can now move in one of two paths - the hacker community will cease hacking and let the firm recover or Sony will continue to post even higher losses and lose business until the firm is on its knees. Only time will tell.

Published at www.liverpoolfchk.com