CAMBODIA’S planned stock exchange would face cyber attacks, experts said yesterday, but bourse officials emphasised that security would be in the hands of experienced partners.

Information technology experts gathered at a conference in Phnom Penh's Koh Pich island cautioned the importance of security issues for the bourse, which the government has said must launch by next July ‘at any cost’.

An official from Japanese computer security firm TrendMicro said it was inevitable that someone would try to exploit the new stock exchange.

“For sure, some smart guy will try to test the system,” said product marketing manager Khongsak Kortrakul.

He said attacks would likely come against the stock exchange itself, which were usually relatively secure entities, but also against individual users – if they were able to access the exchange through the internet.

A major challenge for the exchange, he said, would be ensuring security protection for individual buyers.

“Customers [of securities] want to trade from anywhere, from coffee shops,” he said, and added that connections such as free WiFi were frequently unprotected against threats.

Hitachi Data Systems consultant Vasudevan Nair said that an exchange’s reliability was important for success.

But exchange officials said they were considering IT challenges.

Securities Market Supervision Department director at the Securities and Exchange Commission of Cambodia Chan Narith said the Korean Exchange – which owns 45 percent of the Kingdom’s planned bourse – have been charged with handling IT security. “Our Korean partner has done security well in the past,” he said.

Korea Exchange senior manager Sang Yook Lee said that previous company experience proved that keeping customers happy was crucial to success.