Cyberattack Awareness Vital For 50 Pct Broadband Penetration
11 March 2010 (Bernama)

PETALING JAYA, Cyberattack awareness is vital to enable Malaysia to achieve its 50 per cent broadband penetration target by year-end from 32.4 per cent currently.

There will be an increase in security issues faced by computer/Internet users due to the growing broadband penetration, said head of MyCert and Cyber999 Help Centre, Adli Abdul Wahid.

The introduction of Cyber999, a service launched by CyberSecurity Malaysia in July last year, had created greater awareness among the public on cyberattacks, he said.

He was speaking at the Norton's Safety Bytes Session organised by Symantec here on Thursday. Also present were Norton's business lead for Asia South, Effendy Ibrahim, and Malayan Banking Bhd (Maybank)'s virtual banking head, Choong Wai Hong.

"When we launched Cyber999, the public became aware that they can report incidents such as online fraud, harassment and intrusion for us to assist them in mitigating or managing such incidents," Adli said.

More than 700 cases were reported to Cyber999 as at February this year. It had received 3,600 reports last year.

CyberSecurity Malaysia is an agency under the Science, Technology and Innovation Ministry.

An unprotected personal computer could be infected within four minutes of connecting to the Internet with cybercrime on the rise, Effendy said, adding that personal information and files were also at risk through data loss.

"To keep consumers protected, Symantec has launched the latest version of Norton 360 that includes the latest security technology as well as remote access to securely backed up data," he said.

Commenting on cyberthreats in the banking industry, Choong said 1,191 Internet banking fraud cases were detected in the January-June period last year or 0.003 per cent of the total value transacted.

"Comparatively, it is a lot less in terms of losses as compared to other types of financial crimes. But we have to keep in perspective that the number of customers on Internet banking is increasing, so we need to balance it down," he said.

As the threat to the banking industry was growing, Choong said Maybank was working with security firms to proactively detect and shut down fraud cases, having close collaboration between banks, regulators, security services and police force, and organising public awareness campaigns.