Status Update: Are We too Reliant on Social Networks?

The Straits Times

04 April 2019

A series of back-to-back online outages earlier last month disrupted life as most people have now come to know it. The timing of these disruptions, coupled with the angry reactions from netizens, raises the question of whether there is now an over-reliance on these tech giants.

Disruptions are nothing new in the tech world, but the scale and alarming succession of the recent episode were remarkable.

Mr Benjamin Ang, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies whose area of focus includes cyber security, said it is unclear if the outages were caused by malicious states, cyber criminals or just bad engineering.

Added Mr Ang: “It does not even have to be an obvious cyber attack. A well-resourced entity could find ways to infiltrate, subvert or blackmail its way into these tech giants and their networks, so we should think very hard about what we share with them.”

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