Malaysian Innovator Warns Academic Minds To Introduce Cyber Vaccination Programmes

SINGAPORE, June 12 (Bernama) -- Malaysian-born Jay Bavisi, president of the International Council of E-Commerce Consultants (EC-Council) warns academic minds to introduce cyber vaccination programmes via secure code education. In his opening keynote address of the US National Security Agency's CISSE Colloquium 2013 held Tuesday in Mobile Bay, Alabama, United States, Bavisi pointed out that the success of Code Uncode India must be replicated globally to ensure that future generations of developers are proficient in secure coding. Bavisi pointed out that while the medical industry has been able to vaccinate disease such as the plague and small pox, even the most brilliant minds are not able to prevent the cyber plague without intervention of secure coding practices, effectively the vaccine. A statement released by EC-Council here stated that Bavisi addressed the top leaders in Department of Homeland Security, National Security Agency and the finest academic minds from the National Security Agency’s centres of academic excellence. Bavisi's keynote address entitled "The Cyber Security Quagmire: Finding the Panacea”, aimed to elucidate the information security industry’s successes, failures, and feature out of the box solutions that the cyber security industry can implement, as they learn from the pharmaceutical industry in their fight against diseases. Bavisi, whose family lives in Kuala Lumpur, is the co-founder and President of one of the largest IT Security certification bodies in the world, EC-Council, and the co-creator of the groundbreaking Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) certification that launched ethical hacking as a mainstream career. Bavisi said, “We have unknowingly, followed on the same path as the pharma industry. We quarantined our networks from attacks via firewalls, intrusion detection system, intrusion prevention system. "When this was insufficient, we introduced cyber hygiene by introducing security awareness programme, introducing policies, processes and controls.” Bavisi added that what was needed was in fact, a cyber vaccine to propel the world's organisations security posture into a more secure future," he said. Bavisi continued to link a recent competition conducted in India with nearly five thousand participants, Code Uncode. Findings from the Code Uncode competition decisively prove there is a serious lack of knowledge in secure coding practices that could be a causative source of security breaches around the world. EC-Council is a member-based organisation that certifies individuals in various e-business and security skills. -- BERNAMA