The websites of Singapore's president and prime minister have been hacked after it vowed to crack down on activist group Anonymous, which is demanding greater Internet freedom in the city-state, officials confirmed Friday. A "subpage" of the website of the Istana, the official residence of President Tony Tan, was "compromised" early Friday, telecommunication officials said without giving details.
The hacking happened about an hour after Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's website displayed mocking messages and pictures from Anonymous, which is demanding the scrapping of rules requiring Singapore news websites to obtain annual licenses. The rules, which came into effect in June, have sparked anger among some bloggers and activists who say they are designed to muzzle free expression.
While the defaced section of www.istana.gov.sg had been take offline by early afternoon, screengrabs widely circulated on social media showed the image of a stern-looking elderly woman raising a middle finger. Its authenticity could not be independently verified. It was accompanied by the words "JIAK LIAO BEE!", a mildly offensive term in Hokkien, a southern Chinese dialect, referring to people who get paid for doing nothing. Unlike the hacking of the prime minister's website, there was no indication of the involvement of Anonymous in the attack on the Istana page.
"Both the PMO (prime minister's office) and Istana main websites are still functioning, and restoration of the compromised subpages are underway. The matter is under investigation by IDA and the Police," the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) said in its latest statement Friday evening. "We will continue to strengthen all government websites. This includes the checking and fixing of vulnerabilities and software patching," it said. The defaced section of Lee's official website www.pmo.gov.sg showed the message
"It's great to be Singaporean today," read a headline next to Anonymous' trademark Guy Fawkes mask, a symbol of anti-establishment defiance worldwide. The double attacks came after Lee on Wednesday told local journalists that his government would "spare no effort" in going after Anonymous members who had threatened to wage a cyber war against the government. A person claiming to be from Anonymous last week threatened to mount the attacks to protest recent licencing rules for news websites.