Parliament told that SA needs a national cyber-policing strategy

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South Africa is in urgent need of a national cyber-policing strategy and unit to guard against the kind of internet fraud that saw the state Postbank robbed of R42 million over the festive season, a University of Johannesburg professor and computer scientist told Parliament yesterday.

While the South African Police Service had highly skilled cyber specialists, there were not enough of them and there was no overarching policy to protect the security of SA’s interconnected computer network, Prof Basie von Solms told Parliament’s trade and industry portfolio committee.

The committee is holding public hearings on draft amendments to the National Gambling Act that would regulate interactive gambling, which is not allowed in SA, Business Day reports. Solms said a draft cyber-security strategy was circulated in 2010 by the government but nothing further had been heard of it. Without a cyber policing unit with compliance inspectors, cyber crime and cyber terrorism would just increase.

Most countries had a computer security incident response team that tracked global trends in cyber crime and virus attacks to spread awareness and propose measures to address them. “We are allowing citizens to use the internet more and more but are not protecting them.”

He believed Parliament had an obligation to conduct oversight of the cyber security of government departments and other state entities. The failure to exercise this oversight was partly to blame, he said, for the debacle at the Postbank as no check had been made of its computer security system.