Key NZ role in fighting cybercrime

While there have been no reports of New Zealand businesses or home PC users falling victim to the latest Trojan virus attack launched from China, local government IT security specialists have been keeping a close eye on the incident.

New Zealand officials may also have helped out in the international efforts to curb the attack's impact on IT systems around the world.

The low-profile Centre for Critical Infrastructure Protection is the government agency charged with securing New Zealand against the impact of cybercrime and attacks. It works closely with similar agencies around the world, and other organisations such as major software vendors and IT security companies.

Microsoft New Zealand's chief technology officer Brett Roberts said CCIP was a "world-class" organisation that played its part in the global fight against cybercrime.

"There is a lot of stuff that happens in the background about this that no one really ever sees. It never surfaces. Over the past three or four years there has been a huge amount of work gone into building infrastructure to enable communication to happen quickly," he said.

Roberts said that because of New Zealand's time zone, it had a crucial role when malware emerged that was set to trigger an attack on a specified date, because when that happened, local IT security experts would be among the first in the world to see the effects.

"A lot of those organisations [international IT security agencies] do look to us to be quick off the mark in responding or providing information."