Stop miscalculating risk of cyber threats

FOR the digerati, few dates have ever been so fraught as Nov 5 since the turn of the millennium. But now, instead of a computer being unable to process "00" as the year "2000", the bogeyman of machinery is an actual man. Several men, in fact, wearing the same Guy Fawkes mask and threatening to wreak havoc on the digital economy that underpins the physical one.

Like so many Agent Smiths in The Matrix, hackers have manifested themselves in a seemingly unending series of iterations all over the ether of the Internet. They are unrelenting and numerous, most of the time thought of as a collective and faceless menace.

One of them might have been unmasked earlier this month, and just yesterday, faced the court for the second time in connection with the hacking of the Ang Mo Kio town council website. As the police investigation runs its course, some imponderables might be answered.