4 ms·

you might get personal details of a single person by going through the public internet, but find your way onto a civil servant's machine and you might get perso

• jpatokal 10y ago
  That public website is pulling the data from somewhere, yes? So if you can hack into that, you can likely extract all the data. I suspect this is more about the Singaporean government being paranoid about internal gov't docs leaking out, which airgapping would go some way to preventing. This is, after all, the country that tried journalists for revealing a deep dark secret: GDP growth figures. http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/22/news/22iht-sing_0.html http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/22/news/22iht-sing_0.html (Yes, that's 1993. But still.)
  • princeb 10y ago
    unauthorized dissemination of economic data is a serious offense in many countries. in the states, you can go to prison for it. in this Singapore case, the journalists and the official involved were fined. no jail. lucky them. the official involved is now our deputy PM and chairman of the central bank, after holding various ministerial positions in the last few decades.
    • bkor 10y ago
      > unauthorized dissemination of economic data is a serious offense in many countries. We're talking about GDP growth figures. Those can be under an embargo, but these should NOT be hidden. Pointing at others isn't needed.
      • princeb 10y ago
        they were not hidden. they were released ahead of time. the uncanny accuracy of an expectation article a month before the official release led to the opening of the case
  • galdosdi 10y ago
    Yeah, but hacking into some random entry level public servant's desktop (and then using that to get to the mainframe) is probably a lot easier than hacking directly into the mainframe (or racks in a DC, who knows) that actually stores the data. The latter may take technical chops if singapore IT has their security together, but the former can be done by just spear phishing, leaving usb keys on the street, etc