(BERNAMA; October 25, 2002)

KUCHING, Oct 24 -- SarawakNet, the state government computer network, receives an average of 200 attacks per day but none has been successful, State Secretary Datuk Amar Abdul Aziz Husain said Thursday.

He said the government had not suffered any security incidents that would result in interruption in the service.

"This is due to an effective firewall system that was built to protect the system and 24-hour monitoring to detect and counter any attack on SarawakNet and websites," he said at the opening of Sarawak Government ICT Security Officers' Workshop.

Abdul Aziz said while the security system had been sucessful in defending attacts from outside, the biggest worry was attacks from within the system itself.

"While we plan and prepare against outside security threats, our real threats are the internal ones, from within," he said. Abdul Aziz said the biggest and the costliest frauds in the state civil service had all been perpetrated from within the agencies.

Therefore, he said, the ICT security officer must be vigilant not only to ensure the physical infrastructure support are safe but must ensure total safety.

He said this included preventing employee sabotage such as entering incorrect data into the system, unauthorised deletion of files, destroying programmes, installing bugs and and other malicious software to fraaud,theft and the impersonation to gain acess to the system.

"The first line of defence should be the employees themselves, who as public employees should be clean, honest and security conscious," he added.

--BERNAMA.