Singapore should say thank you to The Messiah

Yes, he has threatened the govt. But look at it from another angle, his threat so far was just being naughty. The good thing is that it has exposed the vulnerability of our IT network in the whole island. We are so wired, and so helpless to an attack. The success of The Messiah and his anonymous hackers is proof that we have a lot of holes that need patching. A dangerous hackers out to create mischief and to bring down our system could have done so quite easily. We could have had it.

There is also a big danger of playing with numbers especially those in the CPF and the banks’ accounts. The permutation as to what havoc can be caused by entering a system is unimaginable. Names changed or jumbled up, addresses changed, the time needed to debug and to correct all the errors is horrendous.

The other big hole that is being exposed is the high reliance on foreigners to run a large part of our IT systems, both private and public. This is like hiring mercenaries to be our soldiers to guard our country’s national security. With such a pervasive presence of foreigners in charge, in control of our IT systems, all it needs is a small percentage of the foreign legion IT technicians to say yes to a potential trouble maker, and we had it. Unless we are willing to pay them like our politicians, to keep them from corruption or free from bribery and other temptations.

And money is not the only thing that could bend a small group of people to turn against the companies or organisations or our country. In the uniformed services, the key personnel are all security vetted and cleared. Are these IT technicians likewise vetted and cleared? This is not a new development and the dangers have been there for too long. We are lucky that nothing serious happened, or already happened without our knowledge. How many or our sensitive data have been downloaded and carted away while we were sleeping? Do we still dare to fill our uniformed personnel with foreigners like PRs and new citizens?

The threat posed by The Messiah is a rude awakening. We cannot behave like business as usual and a major shake up and upgrading of the industry, hardware and software, and the armies of foreign technicians need to be reviewed. The Trojan Horse is peanut compared to what we have invited into our country and system.

The Messiah came with a wake up call to test our system and cause some red faces at most. Time to move the butts and wipe that silly smile off the face. It is not a laughing matter. The Messiah has shown how naked we are.