Singapore Prime Minister’s Office Website Hacked After Lee Warns

Singapore Prime Minister’s Office Website Hacked After Lee Warns

Singapore authorities are investigating a breach of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s website last night, one day after he said he would track down a group that announced plans to hack government online portals. The page for searches on the website of the Prime Minister’s Office was “compromised” at 11:17 p.m. yesterday, the country’s phone and Internet regulator said in an e-mailed statement today.“A vulnerability in that subpage was exploited to display pages from other sources,” the Infocomm Development Authority said in the statement. “The PMO main website is still working, and we are working to restore the page that has been compromised.”

The plan to hack Singapore government sites this week was part of the so-called Anonymous group’s attacks across Southeast Asia, targeting portals from the city-state to the Philippines before a global protest against censorship and corruption.

Anonymous Philippines said it infiltrated 115 government websites before a demonstration outside congress in Quezon City as part of a global “Million Mask March” on Nov. 5 coinciding with Guy Fawkes Day in the U.K. The mask of Fawkes, who tried to blow up the English Parliament in the 17th century, has become a symbol of the movement.

There were no reports of breaches to Singapore government sites that day, and Lee said in a broadcast on his People’s Action Party Facebook page on Nov. 6 he took the threats “very seriously.”

Uncovering Anonymous

“We will spare no effort to try and track down the culprits,” Lee said in the post. “If we can find him, we will bring him to justice and he will be dealt with severely. You may think you’re anonymous but we will make that extra effort to find out who you are.”

A website owned by the city’s biggest newspaper publisher was temporarily offline earlier this week after being hacked on Nov. 1. A video uploaded on the YouTube website last week showed a person in a Guy Fawkes mask threatening cyber attacks on the government to protest Internet regulations.

Singapore from June 1 required websites that regularly publish news on the city state to be licensed and pay a S$50,000 ($40,200) bond, to be forfeited on the publication of “prohibited content” that “undermines racial or religious harmony.” The new law has prompted criticism from Anonymous.

Singapore government agencies were put on alert for possible attacks, the Straits Times reported on Nov. 1. A person calling themselves the Messiah, a hacker with Anonymous, claimed responsibility for infiltrating the website of the Ang Mo Kio Town Council last week, the municipal branch of the prime minister’s district.

To contact the reporter on this story: Andrea Tan in Singapore at atan17@bloomberg.net

PM Lee’s website hacked

POSTED: 08 Nov 2013 08:24
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s official website was hacked on Thursday by apparent members of activist group Anonymous after he vowed to hunt down anyone who attacks Singapore’s technological network.

SINGAPORE: Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s official website was hacked on Thursday by apparent members of activist group Anonymous after he vowed to hunt down anyone who attacks Singapore’s technological network.

“It’s great to be Singaporean today,” read a mocking headline in a section of www.pmo.gov.sg next to the group’s trademark Guy Fawkes mask, a symbol of anti-establishment defiance worldwide.

Next to it was another image saying: “PM Lee warns hackers: We will track you down – even if you think you’re ‘anonymous'”.

The defaced section was quickly taken offline after the hacking incident surfaced in a posting on Facebook. The rest of the site was working normally.

In a statement issued early Friday, the government’s Infocomm Development Authority said it was investigating the incident.

“The PMO (Prime Minister’s Office) main website is still working, and we are working to restore the page that has been compromised,” it said.