28th Parliamentary Intelligence-Security Forum – Cybersecurity: Working With & Protecting Each Other

Mr. Mark Manantan discussed the Cyber ASEAN initiative, a capacity building initiative aimed at strengthening Southeast Asia’s overall cybersecurity and resiliency posture. Cyber ASEAN embarked on consultations in four pilot partner countries, namely, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam, emphasizing on the significance of local context and ownership in crafting cybersecurity tools and dealing with cybersecurity threats.

The Cyber ASEAN initiative found that cyber-attacks are borderless and that cyber threat actors had operations in various jurisdictions. It also identified lack of adoption and enforcement of cybersecurity standards as key issues that must be addressed, in order to build cybersecurity resilience. Results of an economic regression model shows the positive economic benefits of the adoption of cybersecurity standards.

Among the key findings of the study, Mr. Manantan highlighted that backdoor diplomacy remains prevalent in the ASEAN region, given the preference for quiet attribution over public attribution and the complex political security and economic inter-dependencies. In the pilot countries, restraint was seen as a positive kind of cyber defense. In this regard, there was also an issue in terms of information-sharing and incident or threat management, as there was a lot of trust deficit among ASEAN countries themselves. Lastly, Mr. Manantan zeroed in on the preference for public-private people partnerships. Rather than prescriptive regulatory laws that penalize industry players, preference is on collaborative public-private partnerships to strengthen cybersecurity resilience.