In March this year, we had a big cyber scandal in South Africa: the hacking of the Companies And Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC).

Now, there are many ways to guesstimate the stink and stick of a drama. As much as I think this example was a pivotal one, someone else may call it laughably insignificant. Certainly, it wasn’t the biggest or most costly data breach we’ve seen locally. It also doesn’t have the same talkability factor as that time the Free State provincial government paid R140 million for a website that was little more than a $40 Wordpress theme. And it didn’t – I admit – elicit the same gut-punch feeling that the Mirror Trading crypto-scam did. So why is it so significant, especially in such a competitive field?