TheJakartaPost

Please Update your browser

Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.

Jakarta Post

Digital response teams need full access to data to prevent threats

In order to handle digital threats, experts are saying that governments or companies must be able to establish their respective incident response teams with clear frameworks, as well as the ability to have access to absolutely every kind of data in a system

Dylan Amirio (The Jakarta Post)
Singapore
Mon, July 25, 2016

Share This Article

Change Size

Digital response teams need full access to data to prevent threats

I

n order to handle digital threats, experts are saying that governments or companies must be able to establish their respective incident response teams with clear frameworks, as well as the ability to have access to absolutely every kind of data in a system.

As Indonesia, a country where breaches are rampant, prepares to establish its own National Cybersecurity Agency (BCN) in August, observers have given recommendations about how prevention teams would be able to fully deal with particular matters.

Clear frameworks in this case hinge on the aspects of proper governance, an outline to what threats are present and have occurred before and the technical methods of solving them. Observers note that such coordinated guidelines can make a difference in the way companies and governments train their response teams and yield more effective results.

Sunil Varkey, the chief information security officer of Indian IT firm Wipro, elaborated that the most fundamental aspect to consider before a company or a country wants to establish a proper incident response center is to make sure that their digital network is durable enough to withstand the smallest of threats and has the human resources necessary to combat them.

Regarding the human aspects, Sunil underlined that incident respond teams must also be granted the appropriate amount of access to a country or a company’s digital network so that they can freely maneuver through the system to tackle threats.

“Response teams must be empowered enough so that they have access to all sections of an institution’s system so that threat prevention can be done more easily. It doesn’t help if their access is partially restricted to some data,” he said at the 2016 RSA Conference in Singapore on information security.

Stressing the importance of response teams having adequate authority, Wipro’s chief information security officer added that an incident response center would also need to operate under a clear and structured framework so that threats and solutions can be easily identified and educators are able to smoothly teach new response teams quicker.

“Incident response teams need hunters, pure and simple. They can be centralized or even partly outsourced — it doesn’t matter. The crucial aspect of it is to develop a clear framework on prevention so that these hunters can easily learn what the problems and solutions are. It will be easier for these hunters to also pass what they learned down to newer ones,” he added.

Indonesia itself currently has an internet incident response team (ID SIRTII) that had recently been integrated into the National Cybersecurity Agency.

According to data from Microsoft Indonesia, cybersecurity attacks and breaches, especially in the banking sector, have cost the country up to Rp 33.29 billion (US$2.54 million), as Indonesia holds a 50 percent infection rate for malware viruses, the highest in Southeast Asia.

About 22 percent of all crimes conducted in Indonesia in 2014 were cybercrimes, though the figure decreased to 18.26 percent in 2015. Between 2012 and 2015, the police arrested 571 individuals in connection with cybercrimes, with the vast majority — 529 of them — foreign nationals operating in Indonesia.

Earlier in the conference, the head of consulting services at hardware manufacturer Thales’s Hong Kong branch, Henry Ng, noted that the ID SIRTII should elaborate on their education guidelines in an unambiguous way so that even entry level students at academic institutions interested in the cybersecurity field would be able to understand exactly what they face.

----------------

To receive comprehensive and earlier access to The Jakarta Post print edition, please subscribe to our epaper through iOS' iTunes, Android's Google Play, Blackberry World or Microsoft's Windows Store. Subscription includes free daily editions of The Nation, The Star Malaysia, the Philippine Daily Inquirer and Asia News.

For print subscription, please contact our call center at (+6221) 5360014 or subscription@thejakartapost.com

{

Your Opinion Matters

Share your experiences, suggestions, and any issues you've encountered on The Jakarta Post. We're here to listen.

Enter at least 30 characters
0 / 30

Thank You

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. We appreciate your feedback.