KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 19 — Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) will be launching its Risk Management in Technology policy in June this year to provide guidelines, especially for financial institutions, to combat the rise in cybercrime.

CyberSecurity Malaysia chief executive officer Datuk Amirudin Abdul Wahab said more than 10,000 cases of cybercrime were reported in 2018.

“Of this, more than half of the cases involved cyber fraud amounting to millions of ringgit.

“We hope with the launch of this policy, we can tackle these money scams,” he told reporters at the Islamic Fintech Dialogue 2019 here today.

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Amirudin said under the nation’s national cybersecurity policy, 10 sectors were identified as critical national information infrastructure, including government, defence and security, finance and banking, and transport.

“This means 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.

Amirudin said these threats could be both technical and non-technical but most importantly, the threats should not be at the level that would affect the business operations of the sectors mentioned.

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In September 2018, 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.

The central bank said the policy would apply to all licensed financial institutions such as banks, insurers, takaful operators, prescribed development financial institutions, operators of a designated payment system and eligible issuers of e-money when adopting new technological innovations.

Meanwhile, Amirudin said global cyber economy researcher firm Cybersecurity Ventures’ Jobs Report 2018-2021 revealed that by 2021, there would be a deficit of 3.5 million cybersecurity talent worldwide.

With this in mind, he said CyberSecurity Malaysia would be conducting courses and programmes to increase the number of cyber talent in the country.

“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 courses and programmes offered by CyberSecurity include CyberSafe, to increase awareness of online safety and security issues among Malaysians, and CyberGuru, to give comprehensive, robust and cost-effective information security programmes for ongoing professional development.

Cyber Security Malaysia is the national cyber security specialist and technical centre under the purview of the Ministry of Communications and Multimedia Malaysia. — Bernama