There are seven categories of intruders:

1) Cyber Criminals
The purpose behind these criminal is financial gain. They want to hack your websites to get your users get credit card numbers. Cyber criminal comprise the biggest group and they use malware and exploits to steal money.

2) Spammers and Adware Spreaders
They are the most aggressive groups of marketers in the wrong way. They help companies to push their products or services by spamming people through emails and social networking sites, e.g Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. One of the great example is selling Viagra. For more information about spamming, you can visit Spamhaus Project. The Spamhaus Project is an international nonprofit organization whose mission is to track the Internet's spam operations, to provide dependable realtime anti-spam protection for Internet networks, to work with Law Enforcement Agencies to identify and pursue spammers worldwide, and to lobby governments for effective anti-spam legislation.

3) Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Agents
Their purpose is to steal a company’s intellectual property. They don’t look for instant financial gain rather they steal a company’s ideas to duplicate to sell the ideas to other people.

4) Corporate Spies
They are usually looking for competitive information for financial gains and not as organized as APT.

5) Hacktivists
They usually deface their opponent and motivated by political, religious, environmental or other personal reliefs.

6) Cyber Warriors
This is another level of intrusion. It is a war between two city states. The main objective is to disable an opponent's military capability.

How They Affect Your Websites and Your Internet Marketing in Malaysia

1) Your companies' images will be spoiled and your customers' confidence level decrease.
Imagine when you open eCommerce websites and decide to use your credit cards to buy something but hacked images show up, will you ever shop on the websites again? Hacked websites scare potential customers away and spoil your companies' images.

What is something similar happen to Sony Playstation Network happens to your companies? Costs from PlayStation Network hack are expected to total $171 million and affected a reported 77 million network users.

2) Search Engine Ranking
If your websites are hacked, Google definitely can detect and remove your websites from their search engine. If Google detected any malwares your websites, warning messages will shop up in Google Webmaster Tool, they will ban your websites until you remove the malwares. If you have worked hard for few years to push your websites rank first page on Google search engine, what would you feel your websites disappear less than one day from Google search engine?

Security is definitely one of the most important thing companies have to implement to make sure their websites, databases, networks, etc are safe from being hacked.