The Real Singapore

Nov 5, 2013

“Intermittent access while maintenance continues”?

I refer to the article “Govt sites down due to glitch, not hacking: IDA – Some may experience intermittent access while maintenance continues” (Straits Times, Nov 5).

Due to technical glitch?

It states that “SEVERAL government websites were unavailable for a few hours last Saturday because of a technical glitch, and not because they had been hacked into.

The Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) said yesterday that the glitch had occurred during maintenance work to beef up security.

“At no point was it a hacking attempt”?

“At no point was it a hacking attempt,” said an IDA spokesman at a press conference in the evening.”

So, so many web sites down at the same time was not due to being hacked.

External hacking “acceptable”, but “self-inflicted”?

If it was due to hacking – “These recent cyber intrusions gave rise to speculation that last Saturday’s downtime may have been an extension of the attacks” – it would have been due to an external attack, instead of a “self-inflicted” one like a technical glitch.

Singapore more powerful than Australia, Philippines, etc?

Since even the Australian and Philippines Governments, and previously web sites like the Federal Bureau of Investigation  (FBI), were not able to prevent the hacking, if ours had been due to hacking, then it may arguably be quite acceptable, because the best in the world also could not protect themselves.

We should be even more concerned?

However, now that we know that it was a glitch – which can only be due to one’s own doing (“self-inflicted”) – shouldn’t we be arguably even more concerned as to how the worse disruption in Singapore’s history happened?

Perhaps there should be an inquiry to ensure that this does not happen again.

Who’s responsible for this “self-inflicted” fiasco?

As an analogy, if a Multi-national Corporation’s (MNC) entire global network of web sites was down totally or intermittently for up to a few days – and the reason was  an attack by hackers which almost all the MNCs were not spared, then the people in charge of IT may not be chastised as being incompetent because everybody were equally hit despite the best state of the art security being employed.

But, if the disastrous occurance was due to a technical glitch during routine internal operations that were “planned maintenance”- what do you think will happen to the people in charge of IT?

Preventive ‘planned maintenance” turned out to be a greater disaster than what it was supposed to prevent?

The preventive “planned maintenance” may have turned out to have caused even greater damage than the threat that it was supposed to guard against?

There is no excuse for such a self-inflicted disaster.

Which one “lose face” more?

So, which one “lose face” more – ‘glitch’ or ‘hacked’? Ha Ha!

Leong Sze Hian

P.S. Update: Give $1 for your freedom of speech – $1,998.49 to go!