Critical role ahead for new Cyber Security Agency

AS Internet connectivity and broadband become ubiquitous in Asia-Pacific, the number of cyber attacks that originate from the region have gone up. According to a report by Akamai Technologies, in the fourth quarter of 2014, Asia-Pacific accounted for 59 per cent of global cyber attacks, with Europe coming a distant second with 19 per cent of the attacks originating from there. China and the United States each account for more than 10 per cent of the total global attack traffic, with 41 per cent originating from China and 13 per cent from the US, according to Akamai.

A good example of how sophisticated cyber threats can be is the ongoing attack on the well defended online code repository, GitHub. It has been facing what is known as a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack since Thursday last week. The company said this is the largest and most organised attack in GitHub.com's history.

DDoS is a type of cyber attack where multiple compromised computer systems are used to target a single system or website in order to bring it down. GitHub has said it has noticed new and sophisticated techniques being used in this attack. It appears that the attackers are targeting two specific pages of GitHub that deal with government censorship in China. In a blog post, GitHub has claimed: "We believe the intent of this attack is to convince us to remove a specific class of content."