Govt websites down due to ‘routing issue, hardware failure’

SINGAPORE — A routing issue and hardware failure that occurred during maintenance — not a hacking attempt — was what caused 19 government websites to become temporarily inaccessible to the public for several hours on Saturday, the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) said yesterday.

In a statement, the IDA said the fault was “due to a combination of a routing issue and a hardware failure”. “However, this was rectified by 5.20pm (on Saturday),” an IDA spokesperson said. “Claims that it was a hacking attempt are untrue.”

Parts of the maintenance work were understood to have been brought forward in the wake of last week’s threat by a group claiming to be part of the Anonymous hacking collective, which posted a video in which it threatened to attack Singapore’s infrastructure today due to discontent over the new licensing scheme for online news sites.

The IDA spokesperson said government agencies have been on “heightened vigilance” and have enhanced the security of their IT systems in response to the “declared threats against the Government’s ICT (information and communications technology) infrastructure”.

The IDA said that “over the next few days”, some government websites may continue to face downtime. “While maintenance is in progress, (users of) some government websites may continue to experience intermittent access. Government agencies will work to complete the maintenance work as soon as possible,” the IDA spokesperson said, adding that businesses and individuals should take the necessary precautions to enhance cyber security.

A leaked incident report by the IDA over Saturday’s glitch surfaced online yesterday. The report, which TODAY understands to be genuine, stated that an “urgent schedule maintenance” had been called to test “the implementation of a security solution for Internet access”.

The incident on Saturday — where government websites, including those of the Ministry of Transport, the Singapore Police Force and national water agency PUB crashed — came a day after a hacker calling himself The Messiah hacked into the blog of a Straits Times reporter.

On Sunday, the website of Seletar Airport was also hit by hackers, with an image of what appeared to be a skull wearing a hood against a black and green background appearing on the site. The Straits Times’ website, along with other Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) websites, were also down that night. In a statement yesterday, an SPH spokesperson said its Information Technology Division was investigating the matter.