Lanka in cyber crimes drill exercise

The Asia Pacific Computer Emergency Response Team (APCERT) completed its annual drill to test the response capability of leading Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRT) from Asia Pacific economies recently.

The theme of the drill was "Fighting Cyber Crimes with Financial Incentives". The objective of the drill is for participating teams to exercise incident response handling arrangements locally and internationally to mitigate the impact of ongoing Internet based attacks and enable better coordination of teams in the region in tackling cyber incidents.

In this year's scenarios, financial websites handling online transactions including e-banking, e-auction and stock trading were under different kinds of attack by cyber criminals, with an aim to paralyse online business activities, to compromise user credentials and to transfer money to fuel the underground economy.

Criminals are capitalising on the popularity of online business which has become a profitable revenue stream for the underground economy. Criminals use professionally developed botnets (network of zombie computers) to obtain login credentials, to host phishing site, and to launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

Victim computers may be compromised and become part of a botnet when users browse websites infected by malware.

Sixteen teams from 14 economies (Australia, Brunei, China, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam) participated in the drill. They responded to the simulated incidents and shared information to detect, analyze the malware, and took actions to shut down or block systems hosting phishing sites or involved in DDoS attacks across the region.