Cyber space criminals on the increase in Uganda

Kampala - The government needs to fast track the formulation of the laws that would be used to protect victims of cyber crime whose increasing rates have forced the Uganda Communication Commission (UCC) to seek intervention from the police.

According to reports, the Commission organized a one-day workshop to sensitize the police on the laws regulating the information and communication technologies (ICT) sector.

"The communications sector is faced with daunting challenges including cyber crime that has started undermining people's confidence in the use of ICT's, particularly the Internet for transaction of business," says the UCC executive director Eng.

Patrick Masambu. "Take for example spam. What we see is on the cutting edge of security threat with e-mails asking for everything from free home mortgage to awards and prizes, spam is flawed, it is insidious and it has become a great plague on the Internet," he told the senior police officers who attended the workshop in Kampala.

"These and many others are the challenges Uganda Communication Commission (UCC) and the police force can jointly tackle," he said. He said that it is imperative that police and the commission join hands to ensure that Uganda's nascent ICT sector is free from the problem.

He said that at the most basic level UCC relies on network operators to report to them when their systems are hacked.

Victims should help in the fight

"Intrusion victims should cooperate with the government to fight the crime," he said. Currently Makerere University is investigating a source of hate e-mails that are sent to the administrators in order to undermine the top management.

According to the university's second deputy vice chancellor, Prof. David Bakibinga, the clique writes to various university officials and donors to stop funding the institution.

One of the authors is said to be calling himself Jacob Wamukota, an associate professor on sabbatical at the University of Berlin. Neither the person nor the university exists.

In another development, police in Kabale in Western Uganda are holding three men who cheated the Bishop of Kabale Dioceses of sh12m.

The men reportedly used Bishop Calllist Rubaramira's password to access his e-mail and used his address to solicit for funds from Italy.

Personal intrusion

ICT Minister Dr. Ham Mulira said that liberalized information leads to unwanted uses and usage resulting in cyber crime.
"Examples are personal intrusion, national security, fraud and con-activities, that's why there is need to have the legal infrastructure within which the technologies are used," he said.

He also said that there are three draft bills that would be passed into cyber laws. They include the Electronic Transactions Bill, Digital Signatures Bill and the Computer Misuse Bill.

He said governments all over the world are making strides in their attempts to tailor their regulatory framework to suit the rapidly evolving economic and technical realities in communications.

Uganda is one of the countries in the African continent who had to change quickly enough to adapt to these realities and under the new telecommunication policy, Uganda will have a fully liberalized sector that will provide a technology neutral regime to enable the country derive maximum benefit from the deployment of ICT infrastructure.

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