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A global cyber security expert who worked in New Zealand for 20 years says it's time to increase the national internet bandwidth to make it harder for cyber attackers.
Dr Hossein Sarrafzadeh led the establishment of New Zealand's first cyber security centre and also developed one of the world's first real-time facial expression and gesture recognition systems.
He warns all institutions from government, financial and telcos, to higher education and small firms can't afford to neglect the threat.
The comments follow five days of distributed denial-of-service attacks on the stock exchange. Banking, weather forecasting and news sites, including RNZ's website, have also been targeted.
Dr Hossein Sarrafzadeh is now the director of St. Bonaventure University's cybersecurity center in New York