NEWS: Police to be trained in cybersecurity

KUALA LUMPUR: The International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Threats (Impact) is planning conduct cybersecurity courses for the Royal Malaysian Police.

The course, which aims to help the police force better deal with identity theft and other cybersecurity cases, is expected to be unveiled in the first quarter of next year.

Although the course subjects are still being planned, Impact said that data forensics will be one of the first subjects to be offered.

Impact also plans to offer the course as a service to police forces in its 42 member countries.

According to Impact chairman, Datuk Mohd Noor Amin, people are getting more concerned about online security, especially when it involves their identity, compared to 10 years ago.

However, identity theft and cybersecurity aren’t easy problems to solve even if one has international organisations such as the Interpol on their side.

Amin added that because laws to protect against identity theft are poorly enforced or don’t exist, the successful prosecution of identity thieves are not high as they should be.

This is because laws vary between countries and it is difficult to charge a cybercriminal because although victims of the crime are in one country, the servers used may be somewhere else.

“Which law should be used then?” Amin asked at a recent roundtable discussion about cybersecurity.

Ideally, laws on identity theft should be enforced considering how easy a criminal can obtain someone’s identity, he said.

According to a study done by information security company Symantec, 57% of the time people lose their identities because they have lost their laptops or thumbdrives.

“Only 17% is caused by hackers stealing them but either way, there aren’t proper laws to keep one’s identity secure,” said Mark Bregman, Symantec chief technology officer.

Bregman added that privacy and identity theft is a growing concern in the United States with about 200 million identity records exposed there last year.

As it is now a serious issue, Amin said that governments around the world should naturally respond to this concern.

“There needs to be a political will to drive this and I’m glad that there are already governments that are moving towards this direction,” he said.

Amin also hoped that more countries will eventually have some sort of privacy law that will prevent their personal data from being exploited by unscrupulous parties.