Beyond land, sea, air, and space, life state has sailed into the fifth domain, cyberspace. Data is a new soil and water for life, and data is also a new threat. Time and progression put us in a situation where the digital economy is not an option but a must. In today’s interconnected society, no one is safe from cyber vulnerabilities.
The Malaysia Digital Economy Blueprint maps out a direction and plan for a better future. Post pandemic norms witness a new business model on a digital platform invented. The online marketplace and digital commerce segment became the most favorable transaction preference and projected total transaction to reach US$10,919 millions in 2021 with an annual growth rate of 15.97%.
Cyberspace is a hidden battlefield where nations wage secret wars. Trust, justice, freedom, equality, right, privacy, and even religion is at stake. Focus on the MyDIGITAL initiative should not only set to transform Malaysia into a high-income nation and a regional leader in the digital economy alone but include digital literacy and country preparedness with a reliable mechanism for digital threat, data protection and cybersecurity.
Cybercrime, hacking, data breach, and manipulation definitely are unavoidable trade-off for digital transformation. Data breach is an act of releasing a secure or confidential information to an untrusted party or environment. Cyber-espionage is the use of computers to access confidential information and also known as cyber spying. People, governments, and corporations are vulnerable to those threats and data breaches. It has become our problem today and is going to become the biggest problem in our society in the future. We all know those terms but how prepared are we in overcoming them?
We might wonder how the system will suggest a piece of information from our search history whenever we revisit the same platform or sometimes another platform as well. That is the simplest example of how our data and activities are being manipulated by the algorithm and programming in cyberspace prompting your preferences or even generating your complete profile based on what you have searched, watched or visited on the internet. The data is important for marketing purpose and is valuable to the third parties in digital marketing.
There are dangers in being so connected. High-profile hackers internationally have shown they can have the potential to cause physical damage and loss of life as well. The nature of the threat is evolving all the time and could cause race tension, religious distress, international conflict, and political unrest. No one agency or even the government as a whole can manage cybersecurity by itself. The more technology we use the more vulnerable we become because the technology itself is the medium.
We should not assume that we are immune. The attacker is always eying on how to creep into government servers, banks, organization databases, or even personal information such as passwords.
There are roughly more than 4.66 billion internet users who send and receive a huge amount of data every day. Their data packets are ultimately directed around the world by 80,000 autonomous routers. The routers run the internet’s traffic control system through the border gateway protocol (BGP) which is initially designed based on trust where every player is expected to perform their best norm as they can. But the BGP router can be tricked and could be used to redirect data packets off course, that can be monitored and intercepted by cyberspies.
Technically, there is no solution to prevent hijacking the data superhighway. Apart from improving awareness via digital literacy for people, the digital defence for the security pillar should be established. The relevant consultative body should deal with potential challenges and threats as well as how to respond in the digital risk and crisis. A cyber threat analysis must be made known to within industries, clusters, or potential targeted groups. An application or software should be screened for potential violation of right and privacy before it is allowed.
We really need to have a capable device and mechanism to access it. Technology incapability is the critical weakness in cyberwar and vulnerabilities. Cyberspies can even hack the infrastructure that supports the internet. We should also revisit our law and enforcement to strengthen our legal provision to protect the data and information breach.
Recently, a US District judge has approved a privacy lawsuit under Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act paying $650 million to Facebook users who alleged the company created and stored scans of their faces without permission. Facebook, is the biggest social media used by Malaysian (89.54%) as compared to others (YouTube-3.03%, Pinterest-2.98%, Twitter-2.73%, Instagram-1.24% & reddit-0.24%) could also be targeted for the same purpose.
Digital economy is not only opportunity, but also potential vulnerabilities. The risk associated with it could be mitigated by a smart digital nation and extra awareness and caution. Planning, preparation, expertise and infrastructure should be developed from time to time along the technological advancement to align with the unpredicted future threats.