From your experience, is cyber-fraud a genuine threat and are online users sufficiently aware of the dangers? What should consumers, companies and the authorities do to minimise the threat?

CYBER-FRAUD is indeed a genuine threat. As much as individuals ought to be accountable for their own protection, we also need to heighten the awareness of such security issues at the social level.

Given that companies have a vested interest in protecting their customers’ privacy and rights, they should play a larger role in ensuring that their online systems can be trusted.

One of the ways they can beef up online security is by setting up IT infrastructure that automatically prompts customers to change their passwords on a periodic basis, for instance.

Source: The Business Times, 7November 2011