Majority of cyber crime victims don’t report

The unwillingness of cyber crime victims to pursue cases is the major hurdle in the way of investigations and action against hackers and criminals in the country. This was stated by the President Pakistan Information Security Association (PISA) and former additional director general FIA Ammar Jaffery while speaking at the “Information Security Conference” via Skype in connection with CONNECT 2012 at Karachi Expo Centre on Wednesday.
He said that 200 cases were reported for cyber crimes including hacking of website, tracing of emails, frauds through Internet and mobile phones during 2011. He pointed out that most of the cyber crime victims do not report the incident of Internet misuse to investigators due to several reasons including fear of police, black mailing and personal secrets.
Jaffery said that cyber crimes are on the rise, causing colossal damages to the victim companies and individuals in the country. He noted with pleasure that FIA has revived Cyber Security Task Force to deal with computer based crimes. “Use of forensics science system can help a lot in effectively detecting and curbing cyber crimes”, he added.
He underlined the need for creating awareness among the masses specially the users of Internet about the availability of legal means to try the hackers and misuser of cyber facilities.
Quoting the official of Internet search engine Google, he said the Pakistan is among those three countries in the world that are shy of using Internet for trading activities. As much as 190 countries in the world are using it.
Dean Faculty of Computing Riphah International University, Dr Saad Zafar while presenting his paper on “Botnets” said that 5.5 billion attacks of hacking were blocked around the globe during 2011.
He said 4,595 web attacks were blocked per day with the help of mitigating devises while an estimated 42 billion global spams per day were handled last year. He said hackers use highly customised and sophisticated tools and intrusions to hack websites and emails for steeling personal information.
He said 232 million identities were stolen during 2011 while the incidents of malicious attacks surged by 81 per cent during the year. Rewters CEO Faiz A Shuja said that effective mitigation tools were available to take down botnets and malware. He pointed out that systems using Microsoft products were the major victim of hackers.
Another computer expert Asif Riaz suggested teh users to change their passwords after every 60 days.
Technical manager National Agency for Computer Security Malaysia Haythe El Mir, chief consultant SECUREBEANS, Dr Sarfraz of TEXPO, Azam Mughal and partner IT solution providers TEXPO, Dubai Chris Dorny also presented their papers of the security issue.
Meanwhile, a large number of business executives visited Karachi Expo Center held trade negotiations on the 2nd day of 7th ICT exhibition CONNECT 2012.