Cyber-war: Time for Malaysian agencies to step up

LAST month, US President Barack Obama issued an executive order to bolster his nation’s cyber-defenses, a move unpopular with some hacker movements and civil society advocates, eagerly awaited by many, and considered insufficient by some experts.
 
Delivered as part of his State of the Union address, Obama said, “We know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets. Now our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions and our air-traffic control systems. We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of real threats to our security and our economy,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
 
The daily described it as a “stopgap measure” that would improve “how classified information is shared between the government and the owners and operators of crucial infrastructure, including electric utilities, dams and mass transit.” MIT Technology Review said the Executive Order Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity won’t amount to much, adding that it only “requires new information-sharing, standards-setting, and R&D plans to get up and running over the next few months to two years.”