A little effort goes a long way

IN recent months, Southeast Asia has been continuously hit with cyberattacks and espionage campaigns that had caused widespread discussion.

Some noteworthy ones include Philippines’ government employee data breach of 1.2 million records, the hacking of all Thailand’s ministries websites and the infamous Bjorka hacker, with a series of high-profile hacks against the Indonesian government. These types of attacks serve as a wake-up call for us to take greater steps toward cyber resilience in order to protect our cities from similar incidents in the future.

Across the globe, cyberattacks increased 38 percent in 2022 and they show no signs of slowing. Unplanned costs associated with the outages, incident response, fines and ransomware payments are averaging over $1 million per incident. We are also seeing cyber criminals upping their games and leveraging more sophisticated attacks against cities and organizations. Now with the advent of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, it is possible for criminals without any coding knowledge or advanced English writing skills to quickly create realistic phishing emails and malware.

So what can be done? It may seem surprising, but cybersecurity is really about people, process and technology — in that order.

First, start with cyber safety tips and training for employees that make sense. Frequent cybersecurity awareness training is crucial to partially protect cities against ransomware. This training should instruct employees to do the following: Not click on malicious links; never open unexpected or untrusted attachments; avoid revealing personal or sensitive data to phishers; get approval/verify software legitimacy before downloading it; never plug an unknown USB into their computer; use a VPN when connecting via untrusted or public Wi-Fi; do not open personal emails that have not been checked by corporate protections; use unique passwords for every application and multi-factor authentication for access to confidential applications and data, and never count solely on employees to make the right decision when…