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Almost all small online businesses do not believe they are liable for fraud on their websites, according to research sponsored by PayPoint.net.

The company found that 99 per cent of the 350 companies they surveyed did not accept any responsibility for fraud, with most passing it on to someone else.

Most blamed banks (35 per cent), nearly a quarter (24 per cent) blamed credit card companies while 23 per cent laid the blame on payment service providers.

However, 87 per cent did not anticipate complaints about fraud to reduce in the next year and 81 per cent of consumers are suspicious of security systems used by small companies, potentially pushing customers towards more familiar, big-name companies.

PayPoint.net managing director Alessandro Hatami said: ‘Small online online businesses lack the resources of their larger competitors but have an even greater interest in ensuring that customers have the safest possible experience.’

The company suggest comparing the IP address of the PC being used by the customer’s location with the billing and shipping address to improve security.

Small companies should also comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.

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User-generated content (UGC) can be a highly beneficial addition to company websites if it is properly used, a web design company has advised.

Speaking at the Internet World Conference in London, the managing director of Fortune Cookie Justin Cooke said UGC is a ‘great’ way of building a business as it allows the users to ‘do the convincing’ for the company.

Writer Frank Bell identified the key points that make UGC so popular in an article published in Entrepreneur.com.

He said that increased bandwidth, better tools for posting content, better internet penetration and connectivity and the rise of social networking were all contributing factors.

Mr Cooke said: ‘We are seeing more and more of our clients adopting more of a managed user-generated contents and strategy.’

However, he advised that a ‘huge’ amount of content may start failing and that it needed to be controlled by businesses in the same way they would monitor their websites.

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Search engine providers need to be more transparent about how they utilise users’ data, a government initiative has said.

Get Safe Online, a joint initiative between the government and the Serious Organised Crime Agency, has said internet users should make a decision as to whether to remain with providers who use private information for things such as targeted advertising.

A report released this month by the European Union stated that search engines should not hold on to personal data for a period of more than six months. Google and Yahoo! currently carry a policy of rendering all users’ data anonymous after 18 months.

Managing director of Get Safe Online Tony Neate said: “It’s not always exactly transparent why they [search engine providers] need it [user data] so I’d like to see a bit more clarity in relation to the information that they hold and why.”

A June 2007 report by Privacy International said that Google demonstrated an “aggressive use of invasive or potentially invasive technologies”.

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SMEs have been advised to increase their sales by selling through a website.

StartupCo, a support group for businesses, says this form of selling is a cost-effective and non-time consuming way of boosting sales.

A web presence can offer a low investment growth opportunity to businesses, with potentially high returns on those investments, the group said.

Managing director John De Groot said: ‘The absolute key is the ability to generate enough traffic to the website to get the best sales end result.’

He added that SMEs should not allow security fears to deter them from embracing e-commerce but advised them to reduce any risk by using reputable providers of online shopping carts, merchant accounts and payment encryption systems.

According to a report by IMRG Capgemini, online sales in February were up 46 per cent on last year’s figures, peaking at a record high of £3.23 billion ($4.2 billion).

Last week, the Internet Advertising Bureau said that advertising through video websites was a ‘powerful branding and messaging tool’ for SMEs.

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Lord Digby Jones, minister for trade and investment, has launched a new strategy to market the UK’s IT capability across the globe.

The strategy includes dividing the sector into eight sub-sectors to allow for greater focus on its strengths and to create a board that includes representatives from both business and government to help “drive the strategy forward”.

Speaking at the Institution for Engineering and Technology, Lord Jones said ICT generates around six per cent of the UK’s gross domestic product and added that “its importance to our economy is unquestionable”.

The new strategy - being run by UK Trade and Investment - wants businesses based in the UK to offer input to ensure UK ICT “is given the loudest possible voice on the world stage”.

Lord Jones continued the initiative is the “first step” in deciding on how the UK sells ICT across the world.

Last month, the managing director of the sector group at UK Trade and Investment, Dominic Jeremy, said the marketing strategy would be “designed to come up with compelling messages that the industry can buy into“.

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Amateur animators will now be able to use software that the production teams from the sets of The Lord of the Rings trilogies and the Chronicles of Narnia have used for free.

Antics Technologies has released a downloadable version of its realtime animation software Antics V3 that will allow users to create characters and sets in an easy to use, point-and-click format.

Alastair Woolley, managing director of Antics, said that with “simple techniques like drag-and-drop and a simple user interface, anyone with a story to tell or an interest in filmmaking can now bring their ideas to life in real time.”

Users will still have access to the more complicated actions involving special scenes and camera angles that will allow “cameras to view the action from whatever angle and positions you want”, he added.

The free version of the software has a library of scenes and characters including everything from a Wild West scene to a modern city landscape and for an additional fee, enthusiasts can purchase more scenes, import third party animations and share content with other users in an open forum.

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New research has suggested that thousands of databases could be under threat of security breaches because they lack adequate protection.

Researcher David Litchfield has claimed that as many as half a million database servers have no firewall protection, making them easy prey for hackers to access sensitive information.

Mr Litchfield, who is managing director of NGSSoftware, said in his report into the issue: “There are approximately 368,000 Microsoft SQL Servers… and about 124,000 Oracle database servers directly accessible on the internet.”

Describing the situation as “terrible”, Mr Litchfield urged organisations to tackle poor database security because of the danger and problems it causes for individuals.

He also said that many of the databases were unpatched and commented that the patch levels were “atrocious”.

About 82 per cent of the SQL Server databases that Mr Litchfield studied were using older SQL Server 2000 software, while around 13 per cent of the Oracle servers were running on old versions that did not even receive patches anymore.

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