IT team lead attached to State Courts installed remote desktop app risking 18,000 files, gets jail
Janarthanan Tamil Kovan had granted his foreign acquaintance remote access to the government-managed laptop as Janarthanan wanted to use it to take a cyber security examination.
Janarthanan Tamil Kovan, an IT team lead at the State Courts, was sentenced to 28 weeks in jail for endangering over 18,000 restricted files stored on his government-managed laptop. He had granted remote access to a foreign acquaintance, Hari Balan, to help him pass a cyber security certification exam. This unauthorized access allowed the transfer of five executable files to Janarthanan's laptop, which tampered with its firewall rules and anti-virus functionality.
The laptop belonged to Janarthanan's team, which manages various court systems and applications. Despite being warned and instructed to disconnect the laptop from the internet, Janarthanan concealed the incident by deleting files and logs from his personal laptop. He later confessed to his actions and admitted that he endangered the safety of the protected files.
Written by urgent.news from CNA - Singapore's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
