NITA-U’s James Saaka on the fight againt cybercrime in Uganda

PC Tech June 10, 2013

1 minute read

NITA-U Executive Director James Saaka and Director of Information Security Peter Kahiigi

Websites of the government of Uganda have, over the last few months, been the target of hackers, with PC Tech last week breaking the story on over 40 Ugandan websites that were defaced, including those of ministries and government organisations.

The Executive Director of Uganda’s National Information Technology Authority, James Saaka, today responded to the question of cybercrime in an exclusive interview with PC Tech:

The fight against Cybercrime is one that calls for strong cooperation between various agencies.

We are currently training officers from law enforcement, investigative arms of Government, and other key stakeholders in identifying and responding to cyber-crime.

Already, the partnership with UCC, ITU and IMPACT has produced 15 officers from across government who are skilled in Incident Response, as a follow up to that training, next week we will have a team of specialists from the Egyptian CERT training Government officers on Incident Response. We have established links with the commonwealth cyber-crime initiative to help us with training law enforcement and other justice, law and order sector stakeholders on key aspects of combating cyber-crime. Soon, we will also host the internet watch foundation, which is the UK hotline for reporting criminal online content on:

Child sexual abuse content hosted anywhere in the world

Criminally obscene adult content

Non-photographic child sexual abuse images

In building these global partnerships, Uganda will be able to strengthen her capability to defend herself against, respond to, investigate, prosecute cybercrimes effectively.

Starting July 2013, we will commence the development of the National Information Security Framework which will contain the National Information Security Policy, standards, procedures and guidelines for securing critical information infrastructure. We will publish the framework by December 2013 and we anticipate that it will help bring some sanity to the way we manage information systems in Uganda.

Lastly, we have setup the National Information Security Advisory Group (NISAG) comprising of public and private sector industry players and whose main objective is to advise Government on matters relating to Information Security Governance, Risk Remediation, Planning and Response. This is akin the global hub set up by the UK Government as seen here, but specifically for Uganda. It is geared at encouraging various industry players to share information on specific challenges they face in the cyberspace and potential solutions to these challenges.