Under the Computer Misuse Act, first-time offenders who are found guilty can be fined up to S$10,000 and/or jailed up to three years.
That applies to Singapore as well. To deal with new potential abuses of computer systems, the Parliament introduced Computer Misuse (Amendment) Bill on 1st June 1998. The bill passed on 29th June 1998 and came into force on 1st August 1998. The Computer Misuse Act was renamed the Computer Misuse and Cybersecurity Act in 2013.
Case Studies
In 2013, hacktivist organisation, Anonymous, represented by a member known as “The Messiah” carried out ongoing cyber attacks since October 2013, partly in response to web censorship regulations in Singapore, specifically on news websites. Wearing the signature Guy Fawkes mask, “The Messiah” aka Mr. James Raj threatened to “bring down key infrastructure in Singapore”.
In afternoon of 2nd November, he took down 19 government websites simultaneously and alleged used a government agency use Twitter to announce that sites were down due to “planned maintenance”. Mr. James Raj was charged in the Subordinate Courts on 12th November 2013. Despite his high-profile hacking activities, 13 schools website hosted on a single server was hacked and reportedly defaced between 3.30pm to 5pm on 20th November 2013.
Source: Wikipedia
Delson Moo Hiang Kng was fined $8,000 on 5th June 2014 for hacking of Istana website. The 43-year-old pleaded guilty to one charge of unauthorised access to the server hosting the Istana website, carrying out a cross-site scripting attack on Google search function embedded in the website. With the embedded script, he could cause the search function to display text and images that he had specified.
The businessman was charged last November with two counts of unauthorised modification of computer material under the Computer Misuse and Cybersecurity Act.
Source: ChannelNewsAsia, 5th June 2014.
