February20, 2007: Pakistan is spending $3 million to establish a Center For Cyber Crime. This is the result of several trends. First, the national economy is increasingly dependent on Internet access. Without some kind of national level Internet security, the country becomes a more attractive target for large hacker organizations. Second, Islamic terrorists have been making heavy use of the Internet for communications. American intelligence agencies, working in Pakistan with Pakistani police, have demonstrated the wide array of unclassified techniques and equipment available to monitor terrorist use, protect the Internet, and hunt down criminals using it.  The government does not want to be as dependent on the Americans for these services. 

While the American help is welcome, Pakistan has a large, and growing, software development industry. In fact, the first known computer virus, the "Brain Virus" was written by Pakistani programmers in 1986. "Brain" was created to help protect software a Pakistani firm was selling. But, instead, the Brain virus got out of control, and the rest is history. Pakistan has a lot of home grown talent for their computer crime center.

Finally, there is the ongoing "war" between Indian and Pakistani hackers. Most of this has been little more than vandalism (defacing web pages and the like), but there have been some more serious hacks. So the government wants to be ready on the Cyber War front.