Copyright 2005 Reba Shahid BBC Urdu Sunday, 2 January, 2005 SECTION: Science HEADLINE: Pakistan: Cyber Secruity BYLINE: Reba Shahid (translated in English by Rakesh Kumar) URL: BODY: With the origin of information technology and Computers we have been depending more on new technologies. In this scenario, computers, internet or any other information technology (I.T) systems are prone to more threats and keeping them secure from any cyber attacks have become more important. Recently, Pak Con 2004, Cyber Security Convention was held in Karachi. The convention tried to put light on methods to overcome difficulties for securing Pakistani I.T systems. This two day convention was organized by "Pak Con", a non-profit organization consisting of computer security professionals. Javed Wadood, who is country manager of a private ISP called CyberNet commented, "Usually, Pakistanis don't recognize the importance of cyber security. A simple example is that majority of local businesses don't have specialized cyber security professionals for securing their networks and data. They tend to give these responsibilities to the I.T manager who is not the right specialist for this job. Imagine consulting a wrong medical specialist, the consequences would not be different in the two cases. In developed countries, they tend to have specialized people for data security." On the other hand, Pak Con's organizer and CyberNet's security consultant Mr. Faiz Ahmad Shujah is rather optimistic about the situation. "In comparison with last two or three years we have more e-banking and online firms working that shows the businesses are being more aware of cyber security now because all that can not be done without giving proper security measures to those systems. However, now people are needed to be more aware about cyber crime laws. Pakistan has enacted Electronics Transaction Ordinance (ETO-2002) in 2002 that covers issues related to cyber crime and electronic commerce. Javed Sarwana, advocate Sindh High Court explains that ETO-2002 legalizes e-commerce and defines electronic signatures. The ordinance also defines cyber crime and suggests penalties associated with them. According to Section-37 of ETO-2002, Unauthorized access of any IT system is also a crime that counts for a penalty of sever years of Jail and/or one lac rupees. Pak Con also held a computer hacking competition called "Capture the Flag". In which six teams had to hack a central server also securing themselves from being hacked by other teams. According to one of the winner-team of competition, Jahanzeb, "Computer hacking in itself a bad activity, but using it for damaging someone is wrong. There are also positive faces of Hacking, one of them being that you can use hacking to know about the back-doors of any computer system and then you can mend those holes and make the system more secure so as to know about your own expertise and improving security of I.T systems." LANGUAGE: English (original article that appeared on BBC Urdu was in Urdu, which has been translated into English by Rakesh)