Computers can be the best friend of your business, or a weapon used to destroy it.

That's the message emerging from a spate of attacks on businesses that range from corporate identity theft to cyber-dissing to the posting of deceptive video clips.

It's starting to become a serious problem, according to young computer whiz Michael Furdyk, who addressed online corporate reputation at the CIPS Informatics 2007 Conference held recently in Halifax.

"Right after this session, you should go out and register the most obvious protest site relating to your business," he counselled, "and then use it constructively to deal with people who are annoyed with your company."

Furdyk is the co-founder of Taking IT Global, a youth-driven organization that pushes positive uses of technology around the world.

Most large firms have already snapped up obvious protest sites so they don't fall into the hands of a disgruntled customer or ex-employee. Walmartsucks.com and Fordsucks.com are long gone, and Aircanadasucks.com is "parked" by a Toronto-area company.

But there's no thwarting a really determined protester. United Airlines can't do much about Untied.com, a delightful if scary site full of tales of abandoned passengers and airline employees who are "treated like pets."

Politicians (Bushsucks.com) and even cities (Calgary sucks.com) are certainly not immune. Perhaps the most intelligent approach is that of Dallas-based Southwest Airlines, which uses southwestsucks.com to tell you how much they care about you, then links you to their reservation system.

People who want to say bad things about your business don't even need to create a website. Online bulletin boards such as Marketwatch.com provide a perfect venue to gripe, at least about publicly traded companies. Under the cloak of anonymity, investors can moan about the stock price, hurl invective at management and even voice pet peeves.

For example, the cryptically named user "jufrb3" recently wrote about Calgary-based Zi Corp., praising its new QIX technology. Then he (or she) whined, "I have held this stock in various amounts for 10 years. I don't know why they cannot get it going???" Being a private company, or even a mom 'n' pop business, doesn't convey immunity from online attack. Somebody can always post nasty entries on a standard blog site.

For example, walmartsucks org.blogspot.com is where the fraternity of Wal-Mart haters is currently hanging out.

Of course, there are limits to what's allowed in online backbiting. I was personally involved, as an expert witness, in a lawsuit brought by the head of an oil company against a disgruntled shareholder.

The president claimed the shareholder had defamed him by calling him unspeakable things in an online stock discussion bulletin board. Because truth is a defence for defamation, the president had to answer some hilarious questions on the stand including, "are you a thief?" His firm denials, and the fact that the insults were traced back to the shareholder's Internet address, sealed the case and the company was awarded financial compensation.

Then there are the really bad guys. The just-published North American Criminology Report 2007 from McAfee Inc. claims that criminals from all over the world, not just those based in Canada, are increasingly targeting Canadians and are using sophisticated cybercrime technology and criminal techniques. The result, says the report, is large-scale losses for business.

The report notes that a 2006 survey of Canadian businesses found that almost two-thirds had lost income, customers and productivity due to cybercrime. "For many of those businesses, cybercrime cost more than traditional crime," the report adds.

David Marcus, security research and communications manager for McAfee's Avert Labs, says the big change this year is the "professionalization" of online attacks. Gone are the days of the curious, casual hacker. Now organized crime rings use sophisticated tools and shady servers in faraway places. They don't want to impress you with their hacking skills. They just want to steal your money.

"We see a lot of Canadian businesses being used as the lure to get people to divulge confidential information," says Marcus. "And that generally takes the form of impersonating a Canadian bank or online business."

It's actually dead easy for crooks to make a credible-looking bank "phishing site.

They start by grabbing a logo, which is available on the bank's webpage. They build from there, and if they're lucky, some dummy enters personal information and has his bank account emptied.

Are there technical things companies should be doing to protect themselves from corporate identity theft? Marcus says they can use techniques such as watermarks on images and steganography (hiding information invisibly inside a picture), but admits that if somebody is going to fall for one of these "phishing" scams, they probably won't know how to check a webpage's authenticity.

Consumer education is the most important safeguard, which is why he's on a public awareness tour. As if nasty webpages and sneaky schemes aren't enough, the emergence of "viral videos" is proving to be a real threat.

Each year the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) issues a CD/ROM report with examples of hate sites and digital terrorism activities. According to Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the study's director, the big change this year is the emergence of hate videos spread through Youtube.com and other video-sharing sites.

Consider the video in which British Muslim Abu Izzadeen (born Trevor Brooks) "jokes about the 7/7 London subway attacks, mocks hostages murdered in Iraq, refers to Israel as a 'pirate, cancerous' state and blames Tony Blair and other leaders for 9/11 and 7/7."

The SWC also found "Hidden Camera Jihad," which shows American soldiers under fire, "enhanced" with laugh tracks and sound effects.

The CD, which consists mainly of screenshots, is actually too discreet to mention many of the sites that contain video footage of actual beheadings. They certainly do exist.

So does a Nazi propaganda video called "Hitler Builds a City for the Jews," a false documentary shot at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Purporting to show humane treatment of Jewish inmates, the video keeps popping up on Holocaust-denial websites.

Cooper clearly believes it's obscene and offensive, noting that the children shown in the video about to eat food never got to consume it, and were sent to Auschwitz to be killed.

He says that the SWC files "take-down requests" when they spot content such as this online, and has had some success - though of course, it's a touchy area involving First Amendment protected speech in the U.S.

In a phone interview from his Tokyo hotel room, Cooper notes that "businesspeople are the backbone of the online community, both in terms of creativity and money."

He believes they have an obligation to foster ethical online behaviour when confronted with online hate. "We'll never fully eliminate it from our society," he says, "but how businesspeople react to their social responsibilities is enormously important."

Cooper adds that techniques honed by hate groups can also be directed against businesses. As if to prove his point, a quick search of "hate" and "Wal-Mart" on YouTube produces 99 videos, ranging from in-store pranks, to straight up rants, to a bad country and western song about why "southern women love Wal-Mart and southern men hate to shop there with them."

Walmartsucks.com, the website, may be history, but its feisty spirit lives on.

(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)