I must confess, when Singapore had some television drama about the Y2K bug in 2000, i swear i thought it was real! I lived in fear that it might actually invade everything, i think i had nightmares. In retrospect, i've wondered why i was so underinformed..i mean, sure,i was 11 then but it would have been nice for someone to tell me about the reality of it!!Speaking of which, something as scary as a bug invasion would be the pressing issue of cybercrime in Singapore. Cybercrime is traditional crime such as fraud, theft, extortion, and the like in which the computer is used as an instrument of the crime. Since Singapore is a very affluent country, this makes her the prime target for cyber-crimminals. Singapore faces a fast-developing threat in the shape of web-borne malware. On average, MessageLabs blocked visits to 15 malicious domains for every one of its Singapore clients from April to August 2009 – three times the APAC average and four times the global average. This appears to show that businesses based in Singapore face an unusually wide variety of web threats. Futhermore, based on the collected computer crime cases in Singapore, it has been found out that the top three computer crimes categories were hacking (32.4%), fraud (29.5%), and intellectual property theft (17.1%).
So what steps are the Singapore government taking to tackle this problem then? Some of the steps include the following:
- According to Dr Tony Tan Keng Yam, the former Deputy Prime Minister in Singapore, a total of S$38 million had been set aside by the government to beef up Singapore’s cyber-security defenses over the next three years and he announced this at the unveiling of the Infocomm Security Masterplan, which aimed to help Singapore expand its capabilities in cyberspace security.
- There are also various regulations and acts for computer related crime in Singapore. For example, Singapore adopts four approaches in combating computer crime. These are:
- Passing new legislation that creates crimes where activity warrants it
- Imposing severe penalties as punishment and as deterrents
- Providing law enforcement agencies with additional powers, granting them extra-territorial jurisdiction, and creating new agencies with specially trained experts to deal with this technological crimes ( eg. Computer Crimes Branch of the Criminal Investigation Department, the Computer Forensics Branch of the Singapore Police, and the Singapore Computer Emergency Response Team)
- Making it a crime to abet or even to attempt to perpetrate computer crimes
On a more personal level, it is also important to protect our own computers. A plethora of protection and risk-prevention tools against virus, worms, spyware and phishing exist online and sometimes, it is really hard to distinguish between them. More often than not, i'm sure that most of us just go for the free ones! (I'm definitely guilty of this..) While i may not be an authority on this subject, my best advice would be to
- Find someone (preferably an IT geek) to help you with the anti-virus what not, make sure that you can trust the person (sorry, i like to state the obvious..)
- If number 1 fails, i guess you have to rely on the WWW itself, for example, according to TopTopTenReviews, the top ranking anti-virus software in 2009/2010 is BitDefender. (I honestly have no idea what it is..)
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