| Rokiah Mahmud |
THE challenges posed by cyber security are not something new in our society, especially with easy access to Information Communication Technology (ICT), thanks to the advancement in technology.
The increase in cyber crimes in the country has caused some concerns, prompting the establishment of legal acts to protect victims of cyber crime.
This was shared by Dr Wida Susanty binti Haji Suhaili, Senior Lecturer, School of Computing and Informatics Universiti Teknologi Brunei (UTB), during the second day of the Knowledge Convention 2016, which is being held at the International Convention Centre (ICC).
Dr Wida explained that the media has reported several cases involving cyber crime and many of these were detected and the perpetrators of them convicted accordingly.
The reported cases included hacking, data stealing, misuse of information, cyber bullying, terrorism threats.
The Cyber Security Forum 2015 organised by the Royal Brunei Technical Services (RBTS) was held to address such cyber threats, ensuring there is corporate awareness towards cyber security and their respective organisations are equipped with online security.
The forum widely elaborated on two-way cooperation on how to reduce or exterminate cyber threats.
She added that advancement in technology has opened access for people to communicate mostly via social media such as Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram.
Due to this, without our knowledge there may be people who are using our IP addresses, pretending to be us, yet tracing this criminal activity is tremendously challenging.
Dr Wida Susanty binti Haji Suhaili, Senior Lecturer, School of Computing and Informatics Universiti Teknologi Brunei. – BAHYIAH BAKIR
The Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) has categorised this kind of criminals into three groups – those who have technical knowledge yet hunger for notoriety; syndicates that are engaged in a group such as hackers, activists and inside people who open the access to the threats; and terrorists who are threatening national security through cyber war.
She continued that cybersecurity now emphasises on the validity of information that has led to the spread of cyber attacks globally and it gets even worse when religion is related to these cyber threats.
Furthermore, cybersecurity will be a major and serious issue if an organisation or user has sensitive and valuable information and protecting such data from cyber attacks is quite expensive.
Forbes expect $170 billion will be spent on cyber security and recovery protection by 2020.
Organisations or individuals must ensure the use of appropriate security systems with the knowledge of what needs to be protected in order to spend less.
In saving data, addressing a fraud and preventing hackers from committing cyber crime, we also need to handle it in advance because when hijacking or sniffing wireless communications occur we might be exposed to other attacks such as DDOS; SYN; TCP and HTTP DDOS or being one of the victims to botnet/zombiearmy attacks.
In order to address these serious problems, cyber experts are needed to ensure all users are aware of the cyber threats.
In acknowledging the importance of dealing with cyber threats and to prevent them, the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) was established in 1988 soon after the Internet was attacked by the Morris Worm or Internet Worm – the first standalone computer malware program.
Now CERT is focusing more on security breaches and incidents of denial-of services (DOS) along with providing warnings and guidelines in handling any cybersecurity incident.
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