PROTECT YOURSELVES: Amirudin shares his views with Unimas’ students on how to enhance cyber safety. — Photo by Chimon Upon.
KOTA SAMARAHAN: Seventy-nine out of 100 people who tend to spend at least 49 hours a week on social network, will fall victim to cybercrime, said CyberSecurity Malaysia chief executive officer Dr Amirudin Abdul Wahab here yesterday.
He added that those who spent 25 to 49 hours on social network per week, 75 per cent of them would become victims while the risk could be reduced to 64 per cent if they only spent 1 to 24 hours per week.
“Are you aware of that? Many do not even realise that they are exposing themselves to cyber crime by spending longer time in social network such as Facebook,” he told the audience at an Awareness Talk on Cyber Safety at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (Unimas) campus here.
Nearly 88 per cent of Malaysians who had access to Internet had Facebook accounts and they spent at least 20 hours per week or viewed the social network at least 14 billion times every month. It was estimated that there were about 13 million Facebook users in the country.
“According to Federal Commercial Crime Investigation Department, Malaysians lost RM1.6 billion to scams last year, with a total of 18,386 cases,” said Amirudin in the talk jointly organised by Institute of Design and Innovation and Faculty of Applied and Creative Arts, Unimas.
Cyber crime is now a worldwide challenge, he said, pointing out that the underground economy related to it was worth USD114 billion globally.
He stressed that cybercrime would “get significantly worse” because the online population was increasing.
One of the ways to prepare online users to face the growing threat was through education such as the awareness talk, he said.
“Online users must know how to protect yourselves. You must be discreet, skeptical, thoughtful, professional and wary when you are online.”
“If you have a problem, face it. Don’t Facebook it,” Amirudin reminded the audience, who were mostly Unimas’ undergraduates.
He urged online users to report any cyber incidents to Cyber 999 at 1-300-88-2999 during office hours or to 019-2665850.
Amirudin later told a press conference that CyberSecurity Malaysia received a total of 2,499 cyber incidents from January to March 2013 of which 1,116 cases were related to fraud and 862 cases on intrusion. In 2012, intrusion cases reported was the highest with 4,326 cases followed by fraud (4,001 cases).
He clarified that CyberSecurity Malaysia is not an enforcement agency. Their job was mainly in helping the relevant agencies such as the police to look for evidence to nail cyber criminals.
According to the website of Malaysia Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) (www.mycert.org.my), intrusion is an unauthorised access or illegal access to a system or network, successfully. This could be the act of root compromise, web defacements, installation of malicious programmes such as backdoor or trojan.
Fraud, according to the website, refers to any type of fraud scheme that uses one or more online services to present fraudulent solicitations to prospective victims, to conduct fraudulent transactions, or to transmit the proceeds of fraud to financial institutions or to others connected with the scheme. Internet fraud can take place on computer programmes such as chat rooms, e-mail, message boards or websites.
For further information, visit www.CyberSafe.my, www.mycert.org.my or CyberSafeMalaysia on Facebook.