‘Pakistan actively needs to work towards digital diplomacy’

Islamabad : Pakistan needed to actively work on developing its digital diplomacy frameworks, said Ammar Jaffri, former Director-General Federal Investigation Agency (FIA).

Jaffri was addressing a webinar on ‘Cyber Security challenges: the need for regional forums to combat cyber threats’ organised here by the Institute of Regional Studies (IRS).

The former FIA DG said that the cyber world was a stateless domain that could not function in the absence of regulatory norms and frameworks, on both, national and international levels. He observed that Pakistan could not choose to live in isolation and that it required global help from institutions like the UN. Moreover, the enforcement of cyber laws was extremely weak in Pakistan, and hence the reliance on an external source alongside ensuring needful development on the national level was the need of the hour.

Dr Zunera Jalil from Air University was of the opinion that Pakistan must focus on the development of critical infrastructure while ensuring comprehensive cyber laws and policies. Safe adoption of cloud and indigenization must be adopted by Pakistan, she said. She added that Pakistan faced technical cyber-attacks such as Ransomware (Raas) trend, malware distribution, double extortion, blockchain and cryptocurrency attacks, dark net, and an era of indirect monetisation and that all these evolving trends required stringent counter-measures.

Dr Muhammad Waseem Iqbal, Software Engineering Department, Superior University, Lahore, said that Pakistan must formulate a Cyber Emergency Response Team (CERT) which must function in collaboration with the regional organisations, mainly SAARC.