George Stathakopoulos, director of security at Microsoft, believes computer security has been through four main eras – and that it was not until the second that Microsoft began to address the problem with real vigour.

“The first era was the era of vandals and defacements, and it lasted from 1998 to 2001,” he says. Crackers – those hacking websites with malicious intent – would launch high profile attacks, leaving a public mark to show they had compromised the site’s defences.