Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) Razak Faculty of Technology and Informatics (RFTI), successfully organized the Adjunct Professor Lecture Series #3 on 21st September 2021. The lecture titled “Staying Ahead of Emerging Cybersecurity Challenges – Malaysia’s Perspective”.
The invited speaker was Dato’ Ts. Dr. Haji Amirudin Abdul Wahab, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Cybersecurity Malaysia and Adjunct Professor at FTIR. He has approximately 30 years of ICT working experience in the telecom and IT segments in the government as well as in the semi-government and private sectors. This lecture series was conducted via online platforms, Webex and Facebook Live for two hours. The attendees were students and scholars from various academic circles.
The program was chaired by Prof. Ts. Dr. Salwani Mohd Daud, a prominent professor whose research works are related to cybersecurity, particularly the blockchain. Prof. Salwani was assisted by Dr. Hazlifah Mohd Rusli, the moderator during the lecture.
The program was aimed at fostering networking and exchanging of knowledge between experts from industries and academia. The speaker shared numerous real-world examples and explanations on digital transformation brought by Industry Revolution 4.0, social media, and digital transformation that inevitably impacted businesses and exposed resources or talents to a greater cyber security risk.
The speaker highlighted that the COVID-19 pandemic and the new norm that people embraced had increased institutionalized hybrid workplaces, the urgency of migration to cloud infrastructure and applications, and rapid growth in functionality and use of online collaboration tools. Besides, more attention was given to enterprise resilience due to the rising of e-commerce that resulted in expanded cyber-attack surfaces due to the increasing telework.
He also stated that according to CYBER999, the top five cyber incidents in Malaysia were fraud, malicious code, intrusion, content-related and cyber harassment. He proposed several ways such as limit the sharing of social media and online, safeguarding data, and enforcing cybersecurity to stay resilient against cyberattacks. He pointed out some of Cyber security Malaysia initiatives such as SiberKASA, CyberSafe, and Cyber999 are in place to strengthen cybersecurity infrastructure and increase cyber security awareness among Malaysians.
Finally, he highlighted that through Global ACE certification program offered by Cybersecurity Malaysia, we could rely on the steadfastness of cybersecurity program in our country. The session was ended by the presentation of the digital certificate of appreciation by Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Student Affairs), Prof. Dr. Shamsul Sahibuddin to the speaker.