Post 1: Introduction of Malaysia Cyber Law

Before we proceed to any cases, please allow me to start with the introduction of Malaysia Cyber Law.

What is the Cyber Law?

Cyber law is the law applies to all activities happen in the cyber space, the law that ensure people are not misconduct or misuse the computers and the internet for any bad faith events.

Imagine:

With the online banking access, such as http://www.maybank2u.com.my/, http://www.cimbclicks.com.my/, http://www.hsbc.com.my/, and etc have given a lot of convenience to their clients, where the clients can perform e-financing activities easily thru internet and PC without having them to drive over to the desire bank. In addition, clients also take advantage in time saving as they need not to stay in a long queue like in the past conventional way just to perform an easy transaction. Besides, with those internet accesses, bank can also promote or advertise their promotion to their clients or non-clients easily.

This is a win-win situation, but however, with that kind of easy access, if someone intentionally hack into your account and transfer your money to his/her own interest or even others interest, would you accept? Definitely this is not acceptable and this is the reason why cyber laws exist to protect user from any bad faith unauthorized access.

Malaysia Cyber Laws

As IT and communication technology has rapidly increase and getting more and more important, even government themselves also perform e-government to serve their citizen like hearing citizens complaints so that they can consistently improve their operations with the end in view of fulfilling citizens needs by transforming internal operations such as staffing, technology, process and work flow management. Besides, government also associated with third party like MYEG to provide transactions service to their citizen. From above statement, clearly show that internet or “e” is playing an important role nowadays, hence the cyber laws are equally important to protect the right of the computer and internet user.

Below are the cyber laws which had been approved by our parliament:

1)      the Digital Signature Act 1997

2)      the Computer Crimes Act 1997

3)      the Copyright Act 1987, (Amended in 1997)

4)      the Telemedicine Act 1997,

5)      the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998,

6)      the Communications and Multimedia Commission Act 1998,

7)      the Electronic Commerce Act 2006

References:

You can visit: http://www.pcb.gov.my/ to lodge your complaints

You can visit: www.myeg.com.my

You can visit: http://www.laweddie.com/wordpress/current-cyber-laws-in-malaysia/

Post 2: the Digital Signature Act 1997

This act concerns about the secure of electronic communication especially through the internet. Digital Signature is an identity verification using encryption technique to protect against e-mail forgery. In simple, your signature and contents of the email which mostly use in automating signature-dependent processes; approval, agreement, and acceptance must encrypted during send to receive event. Of cause in order to view the encrypted email, the recipient needs to decrypt it with the given key. The Key can be either public key or private key.  

The beauty of this act is to gain confidence across businesses or organizations that needed paperless environment to process e-approval, e-agreement, e-acceptance or even not to disclose PnC (private and confidential) email as the act ensure that the email receive by the recipient is valid. Valid in the sense that the email are true from correspond person or sender.

You can refer to http://www.agc.gov.my/Akta/Vol.%2012/Act%20562.pdf for more information

How the encrypted work?

To do email encrytion, the very beginning is to make sure your email have an add-on encrytion feature.

For an email encrytion, there are 3 components which must be understand during the process

1) Public key - is a key given to everyone who want to send an email to you

2) Passphrase - Your password unlocks your private key and permits it to be used during read and unlock your public key to send and receive encrypted email.

3) Private key - is a key use to kept your secret on your computer since it is used for decryption

The key consist your name, email and password, and it is generated by the software wizard. Your public key must send to a key server so that sender can use it to send encryted email to you. When you receive an encryted email, you will be requested to key in the passphrase to decrypt that email using your private key.