There have been more than 10000 reports of suspected attacks by cyber criminals on South African individuals and businesses in the past six months.But the budget for the government's cyber security hub - the nerve centre designed to detect and guard against online attacks on businesses and the government - is to decrease.Worried cyber security experts are urging the government to pump more money into online defence systems as the incidence of online fraud mounts.Criminal hackers are increasingly infiltrating "ransomware" into their victims' computers. The program denies the computer user access to the data stored on his machine until he pays a ransom.Last week about R200-million was withdrawn from ATMs in Japan by criminals using 1400 duplicated Standard Bank credit cards.Responding to parliamentary questions, Telecommunications and Postal Services Minister Siyabonga Cwele said the cyber security hub had been allocated a budget of R16.4-million for the 2016-2017 financial year, as against R18.5-million for 2014-2015.The budget will drop again, to about R12-million in the 2018-2019 financial year.Cwele said earlier this month that between October and April more than 10000 incidents of cyber crime and queries regarding cyber crime were dealt with by the hub. Of the incidents reported, 75% were classified as posing a low cyber crime risk and 10% as high risk.The cyber crimes most frequently referred to the cyber security hub were banking-related phishing scams, fraud, property scams and identity theft.Cyber experts warned that the budget for the hub was not nearly enough.Brandon Bekker, Mimecast SA managing director, said: "There's a lucrative industry for stolen private data, not to mention extortion with attacks like ransomware."Bekker said the Cisco 2016 annual security report showed that attackers made nearly R546-million in gross yearly income through ransomware for each campaign mounted.Basie von Solms, director of the Centre for Cyber Security at the University of Johannesburg said, " Cyber crime is a national security issue. Of the country's small and medium businesses, 60% owe their existence to the internet. If they get taken down because of cyber attacks job losses will be huge."..