Clustering Keywords to Define Cybersecurity: An Analysis of Malaysian and ASEAN Countries' Cyber Laws

While the term is nothing new, 'cybersecurity' still seems to be defined quite loosely and subjectively depending on context. This is problematic especially to legal writers for prosecuting cybercrimes that do not fit a particular clause/act. In fact, what is more difficult is the non-existent single 'cybersecurity law' in Malaysia, rather than the current implementation of 10-related cyber security acts. In this paper, the 10 acts are compiled into a corpus to analyse the language used in these acts via a corpus linguistics approach. A list of frequent words is firstly investigated to see whether the so-called related laws do talk about cybersecurity followed by close inspection of the concordance lines and habitually associated phrases (clusters) to explore use of these words in context. The 'compare 2 wordlist' feature is used to identify similarities or differences between the 10 Malaysian cybersecurity related laws against a corpus of cyber laws from other ASEAN countries. Findings revealed that ASEAN cyber laws refer mostly to three cybersecurity dominant themes identified in the literature: technological solutions, events, and strategies, processes, and methods, whereas Malaysian cybersecurity-related laws revolved around themes like human engagement, and referent objects (of security). Although these so-called cyber related policies and laws in Malaysia are highlighted in the National Cyber Security Agency (NACSA), their practical applications to combat cybercrimes remain uncertain.