During the past six hours your DNS servers have been inaccessible due to a distributed denial of service attack coming from several network service providers. Having notified your security operation center and CID, you are hoping they will be able to?

You would certainly hope that the security operation center and CID will be able to determine the source of the service attack.

Many virus attacks are difficult to track as they are encoded and can be random in their nature. However, the security operation center should have sophisticated software that can not only detect an attack but also determine what source the threat has come from. This can make fighting it a lot easier and also it can be reported with prosecution being the ideal resolution.

• Protecting your servers and individual computers

Being able to detect a service attack gives the security operation center and CID the opportunity to limit the amount of damage the attack may cause. If the servers are shut down and the computers are blocked from the Internet then there is only so much the attack will do.

Hacking and sophisticated computer viruses are certainly on the increase as the Internet becomes the most popular place in the whole world to be. Some hackers act alone and do it out of boredom or to show off how much knowledge they have whereas others are more organized and have a lot more sinister intentions.

Even the world's biggest websites such as the social networks like Facebook.com and Twitter.com have been successfully hacked in the past. Online gaming such as Playstation 3's service have been broken into and many people's details have been stolen. Of course, Sony had high security on their system but hackers can still usually find a way of getting round this.