15 August 2024
Morning Shot: Mobile Guardian is the safeguard. But when it fails, who guards the Guardian?
Device management app Mobile Guardian was recently removed from all students’ personal learning devices after a global cybersecurity breach affected about 13,000 secondary school students from 26 secondary schools in Singapore. It’s an application that enables parents to manage students’ device usage by restricting applications or websites and screen time.
These students had their devices wiped remotely by the perpetrator, leaving many worried as the GCE O’Level exams are nearing.
Since then, the Education Ministry has been able to fully restore information on personal learning devices that were backed up on the cloud, but a small fraction of devices where information stored locally was not backed up, and hence not recoverable.
On this episode of Morning Shot, Benjamin Ang, Senior Fellow, Head of Centre of Excellence for National Security & Head of Digital Impact Research at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies shares his insights on how such incidents can be better mitigated, and how safeguards and recovery procedures can be beefed up.
Presented by: Emaad Akhtar
Produced & Edited by: Yeo Kai Ting (ykaiting@sph.com.sg)
Photo credits: ST / Chua Kee Siong

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Listen To His Previous Podcasts:

3 November 2023
Weekly Wrap Up: MAS bars DBS for six months, but why are serious actions taken only now?
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has imposed a six-month pause on DBS Bank's non-essential IT changes to ensure that the bank keeps sharp focus on restoring the resilience of its digital banking services.
DBS will not be allowed to acquire new business ventures during this period or reduce the size of its branch and ATM networks in Singapore. But why are such serious actions only taken now despite the bank facing major disruptions multiple times in the last year.
Benjamin Ang, Senior Fellow & Head, Centre of Excellence for National Security and Future Issues in Technology, RSIS NTU shares his views.

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8 January 2021
TraceTogether data available to police: What constitutes a legal invasion of data privacy
On Monday, it was revealed that the Singapore Police Force are empowered under the Criminal Procedure Code to obtain TraceTogether data for criminal investigations. Singaporeans reacted unhappily with the fact that their data is not indeed a ‘secret’. But what exactly constitutes a legal invasion of data privacy? Benjamin Ang, Head, Cyber and Homeland Defence, Centre of Excellence for National Security, RSIS NTU shares his insights.

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27 December 2019
Year in review - Law 2019
2019 has seen change in the law or new laws being introduced in Singapore. For example, smoking was banned along the Orchard Road shopping district and to the most recent fake news law.  Benjamin Ang, Senior Fellow/ Cyber Homeland Defense Centre of Excellence for National Security, RSIS NTU discusses with us the changes we have experienced in terms of law for 2019.

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