The Communications Authority of Zambia (CAZ) has established a Cyber Security Committee to handle general cybercrime issues in the country, Garry Mukelabai, CAZ manager of information systems, announced at a press conference Wednesday.

The committee's formation is a result of recommendations from last month's International Telecommunications Union (ITU) workshop in Lusaka, where concerns were raised over the security of information passing through networks in a connected society, Mukelabai said.

"As Zambia embraces ICTs, more security concerns and abuse shall arise if no counter measures are put in place," he said.

The security of public and private networks and communications systems must be protected, Mukelabai said. The protection of such information guards against malicious and unauthorized access, which undermines consumer confidence in e-commerce, e-government and e-health systems, he said.

It is in this vain that the CAZ is working with the ITU to set up a PKI (public key infrastructure), which would bind public keys with respective user identities by means of a certificate authority, Mukelabai explained in an interview. PKI supports message encryption and e-signatures that further enhance transactional security, he added.

The need for legislation regarding the use of cyberspace was brought to the forefront through heavy lobbying by the banking sector and the Computer Society of Zambia, leading to the 2004 Computer Misuse Act, Mukelabai noted.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.