The Economic Development Board (EDB) is on the hunt for Singapore's top cyber security graduates and professionals. The statutory board launched a new grant on Wednesday with United States-based security firm RSA Security to train successful candidates with the latest skills needed to combat cyber crime.

EDB and RSA declined to disclose the size of the grant - part of EDB's Strategic Attachment and Training (Strat) programme aimed at developing Singapore's manpower capabilities in strategic areas through overseas attachments with leading companies.

The multi-year residency training program will be held in RSA's Anti-Fraud Command Center (AFCC) outside Tel Aviv, Israel. There, trainees will work alongside RSA cyber security professionals and fraud analysts to detect, track, block and shut down trojan attacks or online banking fraud in real-time.

The RSA AFCC has worked with more than 13,000 web hosting service providers to shut down more than 800,000 online attacks globally. Following their training, the residency candidates will return to Singapore and be eligible for placement in cyber security or anti-fraud analyst positions at RSA or within the cyber security industry here.

Application for the cyber security residency program will begin in third quarter of this year.

To address the shortfall in infocomm security professionals in Singapore, the Infocomm Development Authority also subsidises as much as 50 per cent of IT security training and examination fees.

In Singapore, about 1,000 cyber crime cases, including hacking, were reported under the Computer Misuse Act over the past five years, Deputy Prime Minister and Home Affairs Minister Teo Chee Hean had revealed at the National Security Conference last August.