Representatives of Mastercard and the ASEAN Foundation sign the MoU. – Photo courtesy of Mastercard

Mastercard and the ASEAN Foundation, an intergovernmental organisation within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), will work together in a range of initiatives across the bloc’s member states to improve the cybersecurity capabilities of public sector entities and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

As part of the collaboration, called the ASEAN Foundation-Mastercard Cybersecurity Resilience Programme, the parties will focus their efforts on three main pillars: raising awareness, providing skills and training, and improving capacity through technology and intelligence.

In the private sector, initiatives will be geared towards the region’s SMEs, which account for more than 97 per cent of all businesses in the region and provide 85 per cent of the employment.

It will equip SMEs to manage cyber incidents via the Mastercard Trust Center, an online self-service portal that provides free education, resources and tools to support their cybersecurity journey. It also enables SMEs to identify vulnerabilities in their operations through Mastercard’s My Cyber Risk, a tool which allows businesses to pinpoint, prioritize and act on cybersecurity threats to digital infrastructure.

In the public sector, the alliance will drive crucial activities to ensure its preparedness, including running cybersecurity webinars specifically designed for the challenges faced by ASEAN governments and providing expertise on key issues for public sector professionals in cybersecurity-related roles. It will also conduct crisis simulation exercises to identify the cyber readiness and resilience of organisational technologies and processes, and to highlight areas where capabilities can be strengthened and develop research reports, provide risk assessment tools for ASEAN governments and foster public-private dialogues and collaboration to fight fraud.

These initiatives are part of ASEAN’s ongoing efforts to enhance the region’s cybersecurity capabilities, cyber capacity-building, and cybercrime information-sharing for member states.

Southeast Asia has seen rapid expansion in its digital economy, with an annual compounded growth rate of 27 per cent since 2021. While regional investment in cybersecurity has been growing 14 per cent annually since 2021 and is expected to reach US$6.1 billion by 2026, these figures are insufficient to properly tackle the region’s fast-growing cybercrime, which saw an increase of 82 per cent between 2021 and 2022.

At the same time, SMEs are especially targeted by attackers who exploit weaker security measures in these smaller businesses. In Singapore, around 52 per cent of all reported ransomware incidents in 2023 had impacted SMEs. — VNS