The Sri Lanka Computer Emergency Readiness Team Coordination Centre (Sri Lanka CERT CC) established in 2007 to protect the country’s information infrastructure and coordinate protective measures against cyber security revealed that it receives about 200 complaints monthly related to cyber crime, cyber threats and hacking.

“There were only about 200 complaints annually at the beginning of the Sri Lanka CERT CC. With the increase of Cyber crime related incidents, we have been receiving more and more complaints today. Now we receive about 2,000 complaints annually and about 200 complaints monthly. Most of the present complaints we receive are related to privacy breaching and hackings in Social Media Networks like Facebook,” said Sri Lanka CERT-CC Chief Executive Officer Lal Dias adding that the majority of the complainants were youngsters on cyber crimes.

 He said incidents related to E-mail abuse and Pyramid schemes were also among the complaints t hey have been receiving by individuals from all parts of the country including state and private organisations.

He made this revelation at the partnering programme of top IT stakeholders in Sri Lanka-Infor mation and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA), Sri Lanka CERT C- with Microsoft Sri Lanka recently.

Dias said Sri Lanka CERT CC interacts with the Cybercrime divisions at the Police Department, Crime Investigation Department (CID) in Colombo and Moratuwa universities to combat cyber crimes.

Director Legal of the Information and Communication Technology Agency ( I C TA ) J aya n t h a Fernando commenting on governments’ efforts to fight cyber crime said that ICTA had adopted a High Level Information Security Policy along with the e-Government Policy (2009) in order to make governments organisations aware of challenges associated with Information Security and creating awareness amongst people.

Fernando said increase of Cyber threats and Cyber crime incidents have become a negative factor towards the growth of ICT and Internet and there was a need to address the root cause.

“The government has taken many policy initiatives to address this problem by enacting the Computer Crimes Act No. 24of 2007, modeled on the Budapest Cyber Crime Convention and establishing Sri Lanka CERT as the National Centre to mitigate cyber threats and incidents at a national level,” he said.

He said that malware and other vulnerabilities can be mitigated by using licensed software with regular updates, instead of using pirated software. “It is important for consumers and businesses to adopt genuine and legal IT for a comprehensive cyber security foundation” he said.

The Country Manager for Microsoft Sri Lanka & Maldives Imran Vilcassim said the use of licensed software plays a major role in preventing cyber threats and cyber crime related incidents.

According to the Regional Director of IP and Cyber crime, Microsoft Asia-Pacific and Japan, Singapore Keshav Dhakad, Microsoft has also works towards strengthening the capacity of law enforcement bodies when combating cyber crime.

“Microsoft Sri Lanka is committed to increase its contributions to counter cyber crime by promoting the benefits of ‘Clean IT’ and healthy IT business practices around Software Asset Management (SAM), in partnership with IT stakeholders and government,” he said.

Cybercrime ranges from unauthorized access to IT systems, hacking of bank accounts, identify theft, confidential data theft and alteration, denial of services attack, Phishing, SPAM, theft of intellectual property, etc.