Would-be NS cyber-defender raring to start
Private Velusamy Sathiakumar Ragul Balaji, 18, full-time national serviceman. He's in the process of being transferred from the Military Police Command to be among the first cohort of the new cyber-defender vocation. Photo: Nuria Ling/TODAY
SINGAPORE — For some time, Private Velusamy Sathiakumar Ragul Balaji, 18, had been looking forward to the prospect of doing cyber-defence work as part of National Service (NS).
This will soon become a reality: Talent-spotted in a recent cyber-defence competition, the military policeman will be transferred from the Military Police Command to be among the first cohort of servicemen in the Singapore Armed Forces’ (SAF) new cyber-defender vocation.
The new vocation, announced in March, comes as the Ministry of Defence (Mindef) steps up efforts to boost its cyber-security capabilities amid the growing threat of hybrid warfare, including cyber attacks.
The SAF C4 Command, which will run and defend SAF networks that support a full spectrum of operations, will be inaugurated in November. Conventionally, C4 refers to Command, Control, Communications and Computers.
It will comprise the existing C4 Operations Group and the new Cyber Defence Group.
When fully staffed, the command will have 2,000 or so regulars and national servicemen over the next decade. About 1,300 of them will be based in the Cyber Defence Group, which will take direction from Mindef’s Defence Cyber Organisation on policy and long-term capability development.
Private Ragul, who is about half a year into NS, caught Mindef’s attention in June at the Defence Science and Technology Agency’s Cyber Defenders Discovery Camp, where his four-man team emerged tops.
But the quartet, among whom were his friend from junior college and two Singapore Management University graduates, nearly missed out on the competition.
They had signed up but did not apply for leave to take part.
“We were kind of nervous… we were NSFs (full-time national servicemen) and it was our first few months in (our) unit,” said Private Ragul.
The night before the camp, DSTA cyber security director Tan Ah Tuan, who knew the team, got “someone to call us and ask us what’s wrong”. His unit approved his leave at the eleventh hour and “last-minute” preparation followed.
“We showed up the next day for our first day of the competition with minimal preparation and we managed to pull through,” said Private Ragul, who started out as a robotics programmer in the School of Science and Technology.
He began flirting with cyber defence only in Hwa Chong Institution, where he and his friend would try to break each other’s programmes. “I build something, he breaks it; he builds something, I break it.”
Private Ragul is excited about what his new vocation would hold.
Noting the ever-evolving nature of cyber security, he said: “You can’t just get complacent and say that I’ve learnt everything because, every day, new exploits are being found and everyone is (creating) new apps. So, it’s a continuous process of finding and learning new vulnerabilities and preparing to patch these vulnerabilities against attacks.”
