The 2 Nov Straits Times headline (“Some Government websites down due to ‘planned maintenance’: IDA”) was used to explain away why some 19 Singapore government websites were knocked out on Saturday. It being a Deepavali holiday, Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) cooked up a convenient excuse that planned maintenance is usually scheduled during weekends and public holidays due to lower expected website traffic. Legions of Indian IT staff had to go back to work during the Hindu Festival Of Lights.
On Nov 3, the Singapore Police Force (SPF) added to the lie, stating that it was not carrying out any investigation as the government websites which went down the day before were due for routine maintenance. Which made liars of IDA, who had put out an earlier statement after the YouTube video by Anonymous hackers was first posted on Tuesday, 29 Oct: "We are aware of the video, and the police are investigating the matter."
Come Tuesday, 5 Nov, IDA is telling us the sites were down "due to a combination of a routing issue and a hardware failure". The only clue to the truth is the part that made mention of government agencies being put on "heightened vigilance" in response to "declared threats" against the Government's information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure.
Why can't they just admit that the Messiah made them crap their lily white pants with the Anonymous broadcast of Thursday 0ct 31st:
"Greetings government of Singapore, we are Anonymous and we believe we have your undivided attention."
"Now close your eyes and imagine a legion of Anonymous unleashed upon your tiny island and infrastructure."
Commenting on IDA's explanation about a technical glitch, and not a hack, security expert Shirley Wong claimed government sites are complex and can be more difficult to patch. Occam's Razor points to a simpler answer. Tech in Asia’s report suggests the damage was self inflicted. In the course of switching the primary internet link to a secondary link to carry out the "planned maintenance", they ran smack into a router problem at the upstream ISP. Reverting back to the primary connection, they experienced hardware failure at the primary Internet router. The redundancy fall back system failed to deliver when it was needed, routine maintenance failed to detect a problematic router. Makes you wonder when the last routine maintenance was effected.
The situation is not unlike SMRT waking one morning to discover that some of the rolling stock are more than 20 years old, and nobody ordered replacements. Cedric Foo, head of the Government Parliamentary Committee (GPC) for Transport, confessed as much,"infrastructure capacity should always be introduced just ahead of demand. Frankly, we are doing a little bit of a catch-up."
Frankly, IDA had a blotchy start up when their first CEO, daughter of ex-chief justice Yong Pung How, deflected detractors of her questionable credentials for the job with infamous words to the effect: "I may not know what CDMA is, I can always hire someone who does." Messiah need not worry about bringing down the communications infrastructure, there are plenty of guys in-house capable of doing same.
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They are compulsive liars. And their pristine white pants just caught on fire.
ReplyDeleteHaving lost the trust of the citizens their declared aim is to regain it. How can they succeed when they cannot tell simple truths?
ReplyDeleteWhat do you expect when a $2 AIM company can win the tender bid and run IT software for 14 town councils? The Messiah Legions didn't hack that one yet did they?
ReplyDeleteI have this gut feel the Messiah has been hacking and collecting sensitive data from numerous gov agencies which can be incriminating. Now imagine how useful such data will be when the PAP becomes the minority and with one father and son downgraded to being ordinary citizens.
DeleteHaving said, I am also inclined to think the NSA has gathered much confidential information on the PAP buggers and this leverage alone means the Yanks have them by their balls.
yong ah yong, fugly and narrow minded like the dad, and a big CYA queen. Sure one can hire, hire they did bunch of moneys from india and pinoy land, and ended up getting lemons. Anyway, to serve a fugly pig with lipstick, compliant scheming monkeys are more than adequate. Only shame is pigs still running the show in the world class red dot civil service. And paid a million a head too. Slaughter houses have been banned by old fart so his pigs run his animal farm.
ReplyDeleteSo, the previous CEO Ronnie Tay who is also a Rear-ADM General from the Navy has been running the ship for several years now, until the new Deputy Chairman & MD from MOM took over recently, and the whole infrastructure is collapsing like the SMRT scenarios.
ReplyDeleteBased on Mr Tay's public speech in an event earlier, he said
"Arising from the effort, the task force has developed two Technical Reference documents which are available to the public - one that provides best practices for server virtualisation security, and the other on guidelines on cloud security and service level for public cloud services' users."
So who has the technical reference document that was put out by IDA on our very so-called excellent "best practices"?
The start-up is looking more like a finish-up job for someone who has no domain knowledge but can only give motherhood statement that is not even consistent with the reality and truths.
Ah yes, but in the civil service and GLCs, folks promote based on Current Estimated Potential (CEP) of the nubile proteges, not on performance. You can work your back flat and achieve gargantuan feats, but if your CEP is senior manager, you queue behind those with CEP of Perm Secs, like Ron, Yong, etc. And who estimate this potential? Well, other oxbridge scholars who have gone thru the same dog and pony ranking exercise of course. That is how the civil service has become one big self-scratching wayang feathering their own nests with wall street salaries :) Welcome to the red dot world of civil service porn
DeleteReminds me of Warren Buffett's statement once about the banking giants..you only find out who is swimming naked when the water goes out...
ReplyDeleteDifferent but same same.
Their version of truth reminds me of Billy boy Clinton: "No, I did not have sex with that woman!" - from that day onwards, politics and civil servants around the world changed. Even old fart who loves to tell his version of history, started pushing the envelope of integrity and ordered the ST to adopt billy's "best of the best" standard of stretching the truth. Of course now we all know that billy did not deny that it was just oral, and according to monica's account, he loves it the way aunty Zoe does it, all in and down. Unfortunately, we may never know the true account since 60% among us cannot handle it.
ReplyDeleteWow ! You write much like The Tattler
DeleteClinton was also questioned about his smoking pot when he was in Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar.
DeleteHis excuse was, "I smoked, but I did not inhale."
So, I suppose his excuse for Monica Lewinsky is "I screwed her, but I did not impale."
Come
Lewinsky
I
Need
To
Oral
Now
"I may not know what CDMA is, I can always hire someone who does."
ReplyDeleteI may not know what democracy is, but I can always vote for a political party that does.
Hear! Hear!
DeleteFirst IDA said is planned maintenance. Then SPF said they are not investigating. Now PM Lee said he is going after the hackers.
ReplyDeleteWhen they can't handle the truth, how to expect them to handle the truth..until the very end.
i now understand why lhl says we are a sampan 2.0
ReplyDeleteall the high tech software and seemingly good hardware are still running on sampan era.
imagine if he has agreed with koh that we are a high end luxury liner with super duper titanic kind of bells and whistles and 'steady hand' captain..then the whole hackers episode will have made his liner looks like a real sampan instead.
maybe that ida chief is still running it on tdma 2.0 while rest of us are already on gsm 3.0 leh.
When Anonymous Hackers attacked Israel, the world's most sophisticated arm forces didn't say they will hunt them down. Their defence said they openly welcomed their challenges because they are confident their team of cyber security experts can handle them, and it will only serve to strengthen what they already have.
ReplyDeleteOver here in red dot, our leeder wants to hunt them down and bring them to death penalty presumably. So lets ask our leeder how much he intend to spend on additional defense budget that is already 12% of GDP to catch this real phantom? In fact, at 12% of gdp spend, i expect our cybersecurity from our defense scholars to demonstrate that our websites are non penetrable - like what Israel dare claim - their disruption are not successful.
Well, good luck to that hunt. Maybe our F35 might finally be put to good use eh?
Is that why they drum up the counter-terrorism exercise at the tanah merah yesterday? Hallo, we are talking about cyber terrorism, what has it got to do with counter-terrorism on the ground? Is it because mas selamat escaped on a floating device last time? really langgar.
DeleteCan they even catch scroobal or not?!
Maybe in my lifetime, I will get to see the F35 deployed to escort Ah Loong, Phony Tan and cronies in their immigration plan and thereafter deployed again to escort their return retirement at Changi Hotel.
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