2024 milestones: August

Tech highlights for August 2024 included:

- AWS launched Malaysia’s first cloud infrastructure region and announced a US$6.2 B investment strategy in the country. This is the largest investment made by an international technology company in Malaysia to date. 

- Bridge Alliance's API Exchange (BAEx), announced in July, has gained the endorsement of 13 telcos: Airtel, AIS, China Unicom, CSL, CTM, Globe, Maxis, Mobifone, Optus, Singtel, SK Telecom, Taiwan Mobile and Telkomsel.

- Fortinet signed an agreement to collaborate with Singapore's Cyber Security Agency. 

- Game Science's Black Myth: Wukong (黑神话: 悟空) has been going from strength to strength since its debut on August 20. According to VG Insights, 15.3 M units have been sold as of 29 August, while Steam has rated it as No. 1 on the bestseller list.

 

Source: Heishenhua.com. Screen shot from the Black Myth: Wukong game.

- IBM announced the next generation of enterprise computing for the AI era with the IBM Telum II processor and a preview of the IBM Spyre Accelerator. Both are expected to be available in 2025. The original Telum processor, introduced in 2021, was IBM's first advanced on-processor chip AI accelerator for inferencing. IBM attributes the success of the IBM z16 mainframe programme to the effectiveness of the Telum processor.

- Lintasarta, an Indonesian information and communication technology total solutions company, announced GPU Merdeka, a GPU-as-a-service (GPUaaS) for AI infrastructure. The sovereign AI cloud, powered by NVIDIA, is designed for advanced supercomputing in Indonesia.

- The Ministry of Education in Singapore removed the Mobile Guardian mobile device management app from selected students' devices as a precautionary measure after Mobile Guardian suffered a global cybersecurity incident. The ministry said 13,000 students in Singapore from 26 schools had their iPads and Chromebooks wiped remotely as a result. The data was recovered, though the ministry said some data was lost because it had been stored locally and had not been backed up.  

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), DBS, HSBC, OCBC, UOB, SPTel and SpeQtral signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to collaborate on quantum security and study the application of quantum key distribution (QKD) in financial services. QKD can help financial institutions protect the exchange of cryptographic keys to address the cybersecurity threats posed by quantum computing.

Singapore also unveiled an updated Operational Technology (OT) Cybersecurity Masterplan. Three key areas in the 2024 Masterplan are:

- To uplift the cybersecurity posture of all OT operators

- To deepen our cybersecurity capabilities

- To reduce risks and vulnerabilities through security by design and deployment

- NIST has changed its password guidelines. The new guidance advises providers not to require passwords to be changed regularly, and said that passwords do not need to have various special characters. The key is that they should be from eight to 64 characters in length.

NIST also launched the Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism Standard (ML-KEM, FIPS 203) post-quantum encryption standard. The organisation said that ML-KEM is believed to be secure, even against quantum computers.