Pakistan needs to get prepared to timely respond to cyber security attacks, especially in the financial sector, as the event of security breach may ramp up with the surge in use of banking services under the aggressive campaign for financial inclusion in the country. "Ninety one percent cyber security breaches took place in financial sector in Pakistan because attackers know where the money lies," Dr Farrukh Iqbal, Executive Director, Institute of Business Administration (IBA) quoted an IT expert while speaking at the eleventh conference on International Information Security 2019 held at a local hotel
The one-day conference was organized by Total Communications in collaboration with IBA. Imran Batada, Director ICT & CICT, IBA opened the conference by recalling that the last year - 2018 - appeared to be a different year for Pakistan in which a bank faced cyber attack in which it lost millions of rupees.
Noman Abdul Qadir, MEA Business Executive, Security Channels, IBM, said that Pakistan, especially financial sector, needs to prepare to timely respond to the increasing events of cyber security breaches.
"Institution should not feel ashamed of facing cyber attacks, but they need to accept at first that they lack measures to tackle such attacks and prepare to timely respond as data breach events would take place in the fast changing IT-driven world," he said.
He said institutions, especially the educational ones, need to invest in youngsters to enable them understanding cyber security issues and let them learn how to tackle them as they are the future of the country in the rapidly growing IT-driven world.
He urged to establish a national level policy forum which should have all the stakeholders on the board. Stakeholders, who should meet at least once in a month, must share their new experiences about emerging cyber security related issues and how they are tackling them.
Ammar Jaffri, Director General Centre of Information Technology (CIT) said ICT would change the way we live. Robot would take over the world. Humans could not drive cars in 2025. The time is not far when people will be experiencing 5G in the country.
The one-day conference also held three panel discussions on responding and monitoring dark web markets, artificial intelligence and cyber security, and digital forensics and incident response.-PR