Personal data of some 4,000 individuals who participated in Singapore Art Museum (SAM) events were heisted from their outsourced website and posted on a New Zealand based storage website on November 5. The news about the data file was disclosed only yesterday, 20 November.
SAM claims it was alerted of the theft by the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) on the same day, Nov 5. Earlier on Nov 4, IDA had stumbled across a tweet by a "CtrlSalad", boasting of the possession of "3.6k email, numbers, names and IP addresses including the Government's", and sat on it for one full day. SAM's official excuse for its own tardiness in reporting the cybercrime was that they were "estabilishing the extent of the incident". In most probability they were in panic mode, trying to classify it as "technical glitch", "compromise", or "intrusion". Hack was the last word on their minds, and for good reason. A media lawyer at Pinsent Masons said affected individuals may be able to sue on grounds of negligence, with the liability falling on the party controlling access to the data.
In the black week of Nov 5, the mainstream media were in a feeding frenzy, harping on police investigations of three incidents wherein websites were defaced by “The Messiah”, including those of City Harvest Church co-founder Sun Ho, the PAP Community Foundation and the Ang Mo Kio Town Council. IDA blamed outage of Singapore government websites on technical issues, denied hackers were involved. And culminating in the screen capture of the jiak-liao-bee image at the intrusion of the Istana website.
The one time that a spade was called a spade was when the Ministry of Education (MOE) admitted 13 school websites were hacked yesterday. A "Jack Riderr" was fingered as the hacker, as his name was listed in a hackers' database, being associated with a "Johore Hacking Crew". Screenshots of the hacked sites featured a man brandishing a sword, with accompanying words "Muslim Hackers". Some school principals were not even aware their schools' websites were hacked. MOE said they are referring the matter to the Singapore Police Force (SPF), who already have their hands full investigating individuals who responded to the call for "fellow Singaporean brothers and sisters" to dress in black and red on November 5, when Anonymous had planned to make a "virtual protest" on Guy Fawkes day. The foreign hacker will have to wait.
SAM claims it was alerted of the theft by the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) on the same day, Nov 5. Earlier on Nov 4, IDA had stumbled across a tweet by a "CtrlSalad", boasting of the possession of "3.6k email, numbers, names and IP addresses including the Government's", and sat on it for one full day. SAM's official excuse for its own tardiness in reporting the cybercrime was that they were "estabilishing the extent of the incident". In most probability they were in panic mode, trying to classify it as "technical glitch", "compromise", or "intrusion". Hack was the last word on their minds, and for good reason. A media lawyer at Pinsent Masons said affected individuals may be able to sue on grounds of negligence, with the liability falling on the party controlling access to the data.
In the black week of Nov 5, the mainstream media were in a feeding frenzy, harping on police investigations of three incidents wherein websites were defaced by “The Messiah”, including those of City Harvest Church co-founder Sun Ho, the PAP Community Foundation and the Ang Mo Kio Town Council. IDA blamed outage of Singapore government websites on technical issues, denied hackers were involved. And culminating in the screen capture of the jiak-liao-bee image at the intrusion of the Istana website.
The one time that a spade was called a spade was when the Ministry of Education (MOE) admitted 13 school websites were hacked yesterday. A "Jack Riderr" was fingered as the hacker, as his name was listed in a hackers' database, being associated with a "Johore Hacking Crew". Screenshots of the hacked sites featured a man brandishing a sword, with accompanying words "Muslim Hackers". Some school principals were not even aware their schools' websites were hacked. MOE said they are referring the matter to the Singapore Police Force (SPF), who already have their hands full investigating individuals who responded to the call for "fellow Singaporean brothers and sisters" to dress in black and red on November 5, when Anonymous had planned to make a "virtual protest" on Guy Fawkes day. The foreign hacker will have to wait.
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