Bad Publicity

The Singapore connection highlighted in red

Singapore is being flagged in international headlines for all the wrong reasons. The money trail for US$700 million that went missing traces a treacherous route from the Singapore branch of Zurich-based Falcon Private Bank to Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s AmIslamic Bank account. Acquired by Abu Dhabi's state-owned investment firm Aabar in April 2009, Falcon's boast is that security and discretion are their highest priorities in the best of Swiss private banking tradition. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more.

Another shady operation with a branch office in Singapore is the Italian Company “Hacking Team”. Their backdoor intrusion weapon of choice "Remote Control System" (other names are  “Crisis” and “DaVinci”) is described in a company promotional literature as:

“A stealth, spyware-based system for attacking, infecting and monitoring computers and smartphones. Full intelligence on target users even for encrypted communications (Skype, PGP, secure web mail, etc.)"

Marketed as a restricted client base tool for law enforcement, military, and intelligence agencies, Bloomberg first flagged it in 2012 as another example of commercial network intrusion tools being used against dissidents in countries with poor human rights records. Pro-democracy activist in Dubai Ahmed Mansoor's laptop was penetrated by spyware so powerful it can turn on webcams and microphones and grab documents off hard drives. He also suffered two physical beatings by thugs during his campaign for citizens’ civil rights in the Persian Gulf federation of the United Arab Emirates.

Guess what? Screen shots of leaked documents posted by CSO Online shows that Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) has an active maintenance contract with Hacking Team. The good news is that the notorious security firm has been hacked. It isn't known who embarassed Hacking Team, but the attackers have published a Torrent file with 400GB of internal documents, source code, and email communications to the public at large, including the note that demonstrates IDA is capable of nefarious designs against Singaporeans. Yaacob Ibrahim would be so proud.

Even Russia has had enough of dirty tricks