S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) research fellow Muhammad Faizal Abdul Rahman said hostile actors could be trying to take advantage of an impending general election which Singapore must hold by November next year.
The perpetrators could have assumed that with the polls near, it “would make ministers and public servants more willing to pay, in order to save themselves and their institutions from reputational damage and embarrassment”, he said.
Mr Faizal noted that such bulk email extortion campaigns using compromising images point towards a trend observed in transnational crime.
But similar means could be employed by “hostile geopolitically motivated actors” or cybercriminals operating with impunity and not for profit – for the main goal of fuelling political disinformation, he warned.
Mr Benjamin Ang, who heads the Centre of Excellence for National Security at RSIS, said extortion was a “deeply personal” crime.
“Nobody wants such images of himself or herself to exist, even though they are fake,” he said.
Still, the case also demonstrates how the stability of Singapore society could be threatened by large-scale, technology-aided plots, he added.
As to whether the Singapore and Hong Kong incidents pointed to any foreign involvement, Mr Ang said “two sets of cases do not amount to a trend, so it is premature to impute any geopolitical motivations, without further evidence”.
