Organised By:
Consulting Engineering Special Interest Group, IEM


SYNOPSIS

The Malaysian government has been pushing for Industrial Revolution 4.0 which involves much computerization and automation in the manufacturing sector. In addition, there also has been a loud call for more knowledge workers with critical thinking (PC use) in the Malaysian services sector to compete internationally. Hence, if these Malaysian and international product and services trends are to be followed, then the issue of cyber-security cannot be avoided, no matter how hard anybody tries.

The issue of cyber-security has to be addressed from many perspectives and there is this common feeling that it is best done from a top-down approach. This could be right, could be wrong or subject to further clarification, which will be addressed, among other the things in this talk. It will also highlight why so much ‘advises’ on cyber-security, no matter from big and/or niche-specialist sources, can be in the worst case, wrong and in the best case, inappropriate, for a majority of Malaysian companies.  

The subsequent step would be to embrace cyber-security as a work culture and adopt it into the daily Malaysian industrial practices. This talk will highlight the core issues, not the symptoms, which needs to be discussed, to effectively and efficiently adopt the cyber-security measures. Details of cyber-threats will be analyzed and their root method and path of ‘inconveniences‘ will be traced to highlight their inner operations and activities. This will shed light on the current misconceptions in the Malaysian cyber-security approaches and perceptions of potential future cyber-threats. Only when these are understood correctly can the Malaysian industry effectively and efficiently eradicate the cyber-threats at the source.  

This talk will also propose a methodical and systematic approach to cyber-security that could be adopted for all Malaysian companies. All such approaches will be explored so that the stakeholders in the Malaysian technological sector can evaluate what, how, when and who has to pro-actively act, so that the ‘whys’ of cyber-threats are converted into the norms of cyber-security. There is no progress that can be sustained without control, which is what cyber-threats denies us.


BIODATA OF SPEAKER

A specialist in Electrical design, Organizational Information and real-time on-line automation systems, Ir. S. Vignaeswaran has established his technical expertise in the design and implementation aspects of Distributed Control Systems (DCS), Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Systems (SCADA) and Substation Control System (SCS) systems with published international papers on them. The publications reflect a wide area of the industry sectors and it has been leveraged from his Oil & Gas, building services, utility, mining and large scale project experiences. His interest in SCADA systems and subsequently project management, has led him to present an ‘out of the box’ project and information management paper to the Institution of Engineers, Australia as part of his Australian chartered certification.

With a formal education in Electrical Engineering from Monash University, Australia, 1989, Ir. Vignaeswaran has gone on to obtain his Masters of Science in Business Information Systems / Information Technology from University of Keele, United Kingdom. His MSc (BIS/IT) thesis in 2002 was on the development of a Web-based SCADA system written purely in Java.