A scheme aimed at helping companies fight cybercrime is set to be expanded this year.
Police, in partnership with the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, will relaunch a “bug hunting” campaign first introduced in 2023 to help companies identify underlying cybersecurity issues. It will also offer participating companies free testing to identify cybersecurity loopholes.
Last year, 60 companies participated in the campaign, which identified 197 security loopholes, of which 10 percent were rated critical and around 40 percent were rated high risk.
This year, more than 200 companies are expected to participate.
“We believe most businesses don’t have many resources to tackle cybersecurity work as they have other commitments, so we want to utilise our resources to help businesses deal with their cybersecurity issues,” said Baron Chan, head of the police’s cybersecurity division.
Chan said one of their main tasks is intelligence gathering.
“We collect information from other sources to get a holistic view of the cyber threat landscape. In the first quarter of this year, we analysed more than 2.8 million cybersecurity threats, of which 18,758 were related to attacks on Hong Kong,” he said, adding that 46 percent were phishing-related and 30 percent were malware-related.
In the first four months of this year, there were 10,113 technology-related lawsuits, roughly the same as last year, with a total value of HK$1.86 billion.
Police said most of the perpetrators were from overseas, but they were also keeping an eye on local hacker groups.