CyberSecurity Malaysia chief executive officer Amirudin Abdul Wahab said more than 10,000 cases of cybercrime were reported in 2018.
“More than half of the cases involved cyber fraud amounting to millions of ringgit.
“We hope that with the launch of this policy, we can tackle these money scams,” he told reporters at the Islamic Fintech Dialogue 2019 here today.
Amirudin said 10 sectors were identified as critical national information infrastructure under the national cybersecurity policy. They included government, defence and security, finance and banking, and transport.
“This means that if there were major attacks to any of these sectors, it can affect the national security, economic and social wellbeing of the nation,” he said.
He said these threats could be both technical and non-technical but most importantly, they should not be at the level that would affect the business operations of the sectors involved.
In September last year, BNM issued the exposure draft of the Risk Management in Technology policy which outlined its expectations on the risk management frameworks and practices of financial institutions based on their size and complexity.
BNM said the policy would apply to all licensed financial institutions such as banks, insurers, takaful operators, prescribed development financial institutions, operators of designated payment systems and eligible issuers of e-money.
Amirudin also said the Jobs Report 2018-2021 by global cyber economy researcher firm Cybersecurity Ventures revealed that there would be a deficit of 3.5 million cybersecurity talent worldwide by 2021.
With this in mind, he said, CyberSecurity Malaysia would be conducting courses and programmes to increase cyber talent.
“In the past, there were not so many sectors using high-technology. This has changed and today, we cannot just rely on universities to produce these (cyber) specialists as it can take up to four years to produce a graduate,” he said.
Among the programmes offered by CyberSecurity are CyberSafe, to increase awareness of online safety and security issues among Malaysians, and CyberGuru, for professional development.
Cyber Security Malaysia is the national cybersecurity specialist and technical centre under the purview of the Ministry of Communications and Multimedia Malaysia.