Opportunities and Dangers of the Cyber World Highlighted in Knowledge Convention 2016 Symposium

Dr Hajah Nor Zainah binti Haji Siau and Dr Wida Susanty Hj Suhaili, both Senior Lecturers in the School of Computing and Informatics, Universiti Teknologi Brunei, presented their working papers at the Knowledge Convention 2016 Symposium, held from August 23-25.

In a presentation entitled ‘Effective Communication Through Social Media’ on the first day of the symposium, Dr Nor Zainah said social media has revolutionised the way businesses operate today and provides a quick platform to gain feedback from customers and help boost marketing and improve their products.

“A number of organisations, particularly those in the retail business have started to realise that posts made by their customers on their social media may be beneficial for them to make some improvement to their products, services and business."

“Similarly, tweets can also be utilised by non-profit organisations such as government ministries to find out how the public or customers feel about their products and services,”

Social media platforms like Twitter, allowed people to speak freely about their opinions and thoughts and it fulfils the need of a faster mode of communications. She said organisations can also analyse customer satisfaction of a newly introduced product through customers’ feedback.

 “It is common to use an ad campaign to promote new products. Ideally, the success of this promotion can be determined by the number of peoples’ tweet about these products,” she said.

However, she said posts may not necessarily be positive statements. “People may be talking about it due to the negative side of the product,” she added.

On the second day of the Symposium, Dr Wida Susanty in her presentation entitled 'Cabaran Keselamatan Siber Bagi Kesejahteraan Ummah’, explained that the media has reported several cases involving cybercrime  and many of these were detected and the perpetrators convicted accordingly. The reported cases included hacking, data stealing, misuse of information, cyber bullying and terrorism threats.

She added that advancement in technology has opened access for people to communicate mostly via social media. Due to this, without our knowledge there may be people who are using our IP addresses, pretending to be us, yet tracing this criminal activity is tremendously challenging.

Dr Wida also explained that cybersecurity will be a major and serious issue if an organisation or user has sensitive and valuable information and protecting such data from cyber attacks is quite expensive. She shared that Forbes expect $170 billion will be spent on cyber security and recovery protection by 2020.

Further information on the Knowledge Convention 2016 and also working papers can be obtained from www.majlisilmu.gov.bn