Singapore Defending Against Hackers. Nearly all of the most damaging methods of fraud these days occur online. You see it regularly on the news, a person giving their security information to a rogue hacker posing as someone else. These events are tremendously damaging for the economy and cause great emotional strife for all the victims affected by this kind of crime. But Singapore is being pro-active in its fight against online fraud and the government has made considerable changes to the city-state's Computer Misuse Act. First and foremost the name has been changed to the Computer Misuse and Cybersecurity Act.
The amendments that have been made give the police and counter fraud unit power to take action when they deem it right and proportionate. The aim is to ensure that all cyber-threats are eliminated promptly to keep people and essential services safe online. The potential backlash if hackers ever got inside the critical infrastructes of the online mainframe could be catastrophic, so these new laws are there to act as a deterrent as much as anything else.
The Ministry of Home Affairs issued a statement revealing all of the new updates to the law and to dispel any misapprehensions there may be an ulterior motive. All of the changes were deemed to be necessary because of Singapore's increasing dependence on the internet according to the statement. The ‘Lion City' has suggested that because of this new age of technology, that the country is faced with a set of “new risks and vulnerabilities” to the critical information infrastructure (CII) from hackers. StuxNet is one such threat which was mentioned in the brief given to journalists.
Section 15 now says that the minister who has authority in the decision making can order a CII-related official or organization to “take measures or comply with requirements necessary to prevent, detect or counter a threat to the national security, essential services, defence or foreign relations of Singapore”.