Over 130 cyber threats in 2020
Published:Friday | April 23, 2021 | 12:07 AM
The Jamaica Cyber Incident Response Unit received 136 reports in 2020, with more than 70 per cent submitted to the police Communication Forensics and Cyber division.
The major complaints include abusive content being posted, impersonation, and revenge pornography.
This was reported on Wednesday during a joint select committee meeting on the Cyber Crimes Act of 2015 by Lieutenant Colonel Godphey Sterling, head of the Cyber Incident Response Unit.
An undisclosed number of cases were aborted midway.
“A large proportion of it was really that once they got to see what was required, for example, prosecution, they just did not follow through with it,” Sterling said.
Opposition Senator Peter Bunting argued that victims might be concerned by both the emotional and financial toll.
“If they have to employ a lawyer, a cyber forensic expert, it really might just put the hurdle too high, far too high, on top of everything else,” Bunting contended.
Sterling said that there have been instances where websites and social-media accounts have been cloned and unsuspecting individuals tricked into paying over money into legitimately opened bank accounts.
Sterling said the sites were usually taken down once the monies have been received, and the perpetrators disappear.
Local public and private sector entities were also hit with ransomware attacks in 2020.
“One of the challenges we saw is with the remediation, where it was simply a matter of scrub and replace. What that does is it prevents response entities from examining and analysing artefacts,” he added.
Sterling explained that while large entities had the ability to adequately respond to cyber threats, smaller ones were left vulnerable because they did not have the resources to institute robust security mechanisms.