{"id":7529,"date":"2024-07-01T11:11:27","date_gmt":"2024-07-01T03:11:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nus.edu.sg\/nuscares\/communities-and-engagement\/?p=7529"},"modified":"2025-06-11T09:47:20","modified_gmt":"2025-06-11T01:47:20","slug":"defence-against-hybrid-threats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nus.edu.sg\/nuscares\/communities-and-engagement\/defence-against-hybrid-threats\/","title":{"rendered":"Defence Against Hybrid Threats"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Defence Against Hybrid Threats<\/h2>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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GOH Yong Jing, School of Computing<\/h2>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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As a year 3 computer science student, I never expected to work with the Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) to tackle total defence issues while taking a course in NUS. I first registered for this course with the intention of fulfilling the new Communities & Engagement pillar requirement, but the course turned out more interesting than expected.<\/p>

GEN2002X focuses on learning about threats to total defence in Singapore. We gained insights about different threats Singapore faces, such as disinformation on the internet and other hybrid threats by non-state actors, as well as ways to tackle these threats, by strengthening national identity and building each individual\u2019s social and psychological capital. We were then given an opportunity to propose potential community-based solutions to tackle these threats.<\/p>

The teaching team places a strong emphasis on the feasibility of our solutions. During the mid-course presentations, I remember seeing many groups with ideas that I thought were creative and interesting. However, many of these teams were given feedback on how their solution might not be feasible in real life. Initially, we received feedback that our team\u2019s idea of creating an all-in-one website to tackle scams and strengthen digital defence was infeasible due to the operating costs of maintaining a server for the website as well as hiring experts to maintain the website to keep it safe and secure.<\/p>

Following the feedback given, we decided to build our solution on the existing social media platform Discord instead to tackle the problem of high maintenance costs. We put together different features in our Discord group, such as forums for members of the community to ask and answer each other\u2019s questions and support each other. We also wrote a bot to automatically consolidate news from various sources regarding the latest scam tactics in Singapore to inform our members in Discord to be vigilant. Leveraging our social capital, we invited our friends to our solution\u2019s trial run, especially those who have experienced scams. The trial involved participation in some activities on Discord such as guessing if the given images of emails and text messages are scams or not.<\/p>

To our pleasant surprise, we were invited to set up a booth at the recent Total Defence Convention (TD40) to share more about our project with members of the public. The TD40 convention, held at the NUS Shaw Foundation Alumni House on the 25th of April, 2024, showcases ideas contributed by fellow Singaporeans on how our community can put Total Defence into action, allowing them to partner with MINDEF to implement their ideas.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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Figure 1: Our booth at the Total Defence Convention<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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Figure 2: At the Total Defence Convention (TD40) earlier this year<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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On that day, I was surprised at the large crowd of professionals from different sectors attending the convention, and interacted with members from Channel News Asia, the Singapore Police Force, as well as Senior Minister of State Mr Zaqy. The event really demonstrated the power of the community in strengthening total defence, as we received useful feedback for our solution (e.g., maintaining separate channels for different languages) to widen our reach and target audience.<\/p>\n

This course was no doubt challenging due to the higher-than-expected workload in completing many small but important tasks, such as designing posters, banners, group logos, communicating and liaising with different parties, on top of delivering graded course deliverables such as improving our Discord group, doing research, writing reports and preparing for presentations. Nevertheless, I am proud of the hard work we put together to ensure a successful presentation at the TD40 convention. Through this course, I learnt that total defence is something that ordinary citizens can play a part in. We can simply look around us and put together existing tools to make a difference in our community, just like we did by building a community using an existing social media platform.<\/span><\/p>\n

To my juniors planning to take this course in the future, do make the best of it as not many courses evaluate your project ideas and solutions so insightfully based on real world requirements and standards. I would also like to encourage you to look for gaps in existing solutions and brainstorm for ways to solve them. Although the workload is higher than you might expect, it is important to spend more time in order to properly build and refine your solution. This is a very rare opportunity to present your ideas to make a substantial difference for total defence in Singapore, while gaining new skills and knowledge.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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\u2190 Back to Story Listing<\/a><\/div>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

GEN2002 student GOH Yong Jing shares his team\u2019s journey to presenting at the Total Defence 40 (TD40) Convention.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":8322,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[67],"class_list":["post-7529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-archive"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nus.edu.sg\/nuscares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nus.edu.sg\/nuscares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nus.edu.sg\/nuscares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nus.edu.sg\/nuscares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nus.edu.sg\/nuscares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7529"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.nus.edu.sg\/nuscares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11763,"href":"https:\/\/www.nus.edu.sg\/nuscares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7529\/revisions\/11763"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nus.edu.sg\/nuscares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nus.edu.sg\/nuscares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nus.edu.sg\/nuscares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nus.edu.sg\/nuscares\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}