PUTRAJAYA: CyberSecurity Malaysia receives between 9,000 and 10,000 incident reports each year on various matters of contention happening in cyberspace.
Its chief executive officer Datuk Dr Amirudin Abdul Wahab said one of the reported incidents were data breaches, classified under the intrusion category.
"This category also includes hacking. For data breaches, we are seeing a rising trend (over the last few years). In 2015, we received seven data breach reported incidents and six cases last year.
"This year until September, however, we have seen a four-fold increase with 22 reported incidents on data breaches (alone).
"It shows now that data breaches are a concern. Individuals as well as organisations would do well to adopt best practices," he said.
He was speaking to reporters after the signing of a memorandum of understanding between CyberSecurity Malaysia and Turkey's May Cyber Teknoloji.
The MoU identifies three areas of collaboration- research and development covering the areas of cyber security technical, tools, methods and processes; capacity building through competency training programmes as well as cyber security skills, and develop marketing strategies to promote cyber security.
Amirudin said data breaches are not a local phenomenon, noting that cyber threats, data breaches and cyber crime had been listed as the top three global risks last year.
For the past five to six years, he said, CyberSecurity has seen a growing number of cyber incidents with fraud topping the list followed by intrusion, malicious codes and cyber harassment.
As of October, the cyber security specialist agency has received 3,240 reported incidents on fraud; 1,781 on intrusion; 694 on malicious codes and 499 on cyber harassment.
"We have so far received 6,891 incident reports in total as of October this year," said Amirudin.
Meanwhile, chairman of the CyberSecurity Board of Directors, General Tan Sri Mohd Azumi Mohamed says the recent data leak involving data of 46.2 million Malaysian mobile phone customers is now a police case.
"As we are fully aware, the police are investigating (it). So let us leave it to the police," he said, declining to elaborate on the case.
It was reported recently that a data comprising mobile phone numbers, identification card numbers, home addresses, IMEI and SIM card data had been leaked.
The data breach was first reported last month by public online forum Lowyat.net, which said it had received information that someone was trying to sell huge databases of personal information.
The databases are also believed to contain private information of more than 80,000 individuals, leaked from records of the Malaysian Medical Council, the Malaysian Medical Association, and the Malaysian Dental Association, Lowyat.net reportedly said.
Amirudin said CyberSecurity is always ready to provide its technical support and expertise to any enforcement agencies, which it had done before.
"For example, if there is a (data) breach, they can report to our Cyber999 or call us at 1-300-88-2999," he said, adding that the statistics he gave earlier did not include the data leak incident of more than 40 million telco customers.