Government's plan to fix amount spent on cyber security welcome

GOVERNMENTS around the world are taking cyber security very seriously, given the nature of the threat and the potential harm that can come from a security breach. Singapore is no exception in this regard with its spending on cyber security having gone up manifold over the past few years. For example, it went up from S$29 million in fiscal 2013 to S$408.6 million in fiscal 2014.

But is this enough? Unfortunately there is no upper limit on how much money needs to be spent to ensure that the nation, its companies and institutions, as well as ordinary Singaporeans, remain safe from cyber attacks, which can potentially cause major harm with personal data breaches, financial loss and disruption of infrastructure.

Speaking at the Governmentware 2015 conference in Singapore earlier this week, Yaacob Ibrahim, Minister for Communications and Information, and Minister-in-charge of Cyber Security, made the important point that countries such as Israel and South Korea actually prescribe the level of cyber security expenditure required every year. Israel stipulates that 8 per cent of its total government IT budget must be allocated to cyber security, while in South Korea the figure is as much as 10 per cent.