Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper website was defaced by someone claiming to be a member of hacking collective Anonymous to protest what it calls the misleading report on another Anonymous call for a day of protests on 5th November.
The hacker said that the Straits Times conveniently “chose to conveniently modify the sentence 'war against the Singapore government' into 'war against Singapore'”.
The protests are aimed at protesting Singapore’s strict internet licensing laws. Any website that reports on Singaporean news with a significant reach among Singaporeans need to apply for an annual licence which needs an S$50,000 ($40,200) performance bond.
The Anon speaking on YouTube called the framework ridiculous, communistic, oppressive and offensive. It called for people to black out their Facebook profiles while Anonymous would be staging a protest alongside.
Meanwhile, on Saturday many of Singapore’s government websites went down for maintenance. Singapore’s Infocomm Authority said that the sites were down for planned maintenance due to lower traffic on weekends, but that some sites were down for longer than planned.
Websites of the ministries of Home Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Trade and Industry, Finance and Transport; agencies such as the Singapore Police Force and the IDA were still down as of 5.20pm Saturday, according to the Straits Times.
However, many on social media questioned if the outage was indeed planned, or whether it was an attempt to fortify the government’s infrastructure ahead of the Anonymous threat.