Hope It's Not Maintenance

On Saturday, more than a dozen Singapore government websites went down. After the online threat from hacking group “Anonymous”, most people thought this was the result of an online attack from the group. However the IDA (Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore) insist it's otherwise.

According to the IDA, the government websites went down not because of an attack but due to a planned maintenance. Most people met this with skepticism as this “planned maintenance” was not announced, it happened on a Saturday afternoon and it came just after the Strait Times newspaper website got hacked.

Now there’s 2 ways to look at this. Either the IDA is telling the truth; or they are not. Frankly, I rather hope they are not because if the IDA is telling the truth, this means that the Singapore government is so afraid of Anonymous that they rather take down their own websites than let it face an attack from the hacking group.

Sorry but that’s just stupid.

So Anonymous knocked down websites belonging to the Singapore government…so what? The group knocked down websites belonging to the U.S. government, even if out websites are down because of them, we are in good company. But if we took down our own websites, if we were running scared because of a hacking group, that’s just embarrassing.  

It’s better to be knocked down than to surrender and if the Singapore government really did take down their own websites due to some online threat from a hacking group, that’s surrender. So hopefully, the IDA is not telling the truth. I rather have the government websites get taken out by Anonymous on Saturday than to be under “planned maintenance”.