Kaspersky's data on cyber attacks in Southeast Asia in 2022. (Photo: headtopics.com)

Kuala Lumpur - Finance and healthcare are the top two sectors experiencing cyber attacks in Malaysia this year despite growing resilience and awareness among financial institutions, said Kaspersky Southeast Asia general manager Yeo Siang Tiong.

Speaking at Kaspersky Cyber Security Weekends 2023 held in Bali, Indonesia, Yeo said that the same trend was also observed in other ASEAN countries this year.

He explained that the financial sector is where the money is while the government and healthcare sectors contain a lot of data, including personal data which have a lot of value for which cyber attackers can gain benefit.

Although facing the most attacks, the Malaysia’s financial sector has seen some improvement in cyber resilience after Bank Negara instructed banks to follow the risk management in technology framework.

In addressing the rising threat and risk of cyber attacks from the government perspective, Yeo said there was a need for the government to address the issue from the regulation and policy standpoints.

He said Kaspersky is working very closely and having collaboration with the National Cyber Security Agency (NACSA) and Cybersecurity Malaysia (CSM) from the government side for sharing information with them. Then, the agencies will get early signals from Kaspersky if the cyber security firm see a cyber attacks is happening.

The Malaysian government is looking at the possibilities of making some changes to the two agencies involved in cybersecurity.

Yeo said that said organisations need to learn and do their due diligence by exercising a fair share process to protect their own environment and from the consumers’ perspective, awareness is the most effective way.

With the digital economy growing rapidly across the ASEAN region at an expected growth rate of 20% year-on-year, more data will be used by the industry and it requires more protection on its information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT).

Kaspersky announced that the company detects an average of 400,000 new malicious attacks on a daily basis and has been responding to the detection by using the latest technology.

Kaspersky highlighted that AI has emerged as a powerful tool in the field of cybersecurity and beyond with the arrival of ChatGPT in November 2022 triggering debates and conversations on AI.

It showed the tangible effects of this neural network technology and revealed AI’s potential to disrupt industries globally.