Jail for man who allowed unlawful remote connection to government-managed laptop

SINGAPORE – A man attached to the State Courts as an external info-communication technology (IT) vendor made an unlawful modification to a government-managed laptop issued to him, allowing an unauthorised person to access it remotely.

This compromised the safety of more than 18,000 files belonging to the State Courts, although no exfiltration took place during the remote connection.

Janarthanan Tamil Kovan, 42, was sentenced to 28 weeks’ jail on Sept 28 after he pleaded guilty to one count each of misusing a computer system and an offence under the Official Secrets Act.

Ironically, he committed the offences as he wanted to use the government-managed laptop to take an examination in information security, as his personal laptop had a faulty screen.

Deputy Public Prosecutor Matthew Choo said: “While the files themselves did not contain any sensitive case-specific information, (they) contained information that could potentially be used to gain unauthorised access to various systems that contained sensitive and confidential information, such as case information and judges’ notes.”

Court documents stated that Janarthanan, an Indian national, was employed as a service delivery manager with IT firm Lenovo PCCW Solutions in 2017.

In June 2024, he was attached to the State Courts as an external vendor, and was a team leader of its cloud system team, which managed the various systems and applications there.

He was issued with the government-managed laptop, which contained 18,016 files belonging to the State Courts, including the login credentials of the State Courts’ network.

The laptop was protected by the GovTech’s Security Suite for Engineering Endpoint Devices (SEED), a mobile device management platform.

On Aug 4, 2025, Janarthanan tried to use the laptop to take an examination to obtain certification as a “Certified Information Security Manager”.

However, the laptop was unable to clear the necessary security checks.

Janarthanan then reached out for help from a man identified as “Hari Balan”, whom he had previously communicated with on WhatsApp about IT-related courses.

Hari Balan asked Janarthanan to download “UltraViewer” onto the laptop, so Hari Balan could remotely access and control the device.

Janarthanan did as he was told, and a remote connection was later established between the laptop and another device with an internet protocol address traced to India.

During the remote connection, Hari Balan transferred several files into the laptop.

Subsequently, GovTech’s SEED team was alerted to the presence of the files on the laptop and contacted Janarthanan.

Janarthanan falsely denied the running of UltraViewer and claimed that the laptop was unresponsive.

The team later reported the incident to the Government IT Security Incident Response (GITSIR).

To cover his tracks, Janarthanan cleared the laptop’s browsing history on Aug 5, 2025.

Two days later, he also deleted the UltraViewer application folder.

He did so before handing over the laptop to GITSIR

He was later arrested in June 2026.

Following this incident, the State Courts’ Innovation, Technology and Transformation Division undertook a change of all implicated security keys.

Immediate mitigation measures were also employed, including password changes.

Additionally, the State Courts also conducted a review of their systems and traffic logs to ensure that no anomalies, unauthorised accesses or data exfiltration had occurred.

In a statement, the Singapore Courts said: “Upon discovery of the suspicious activity, (we) took immediate steps to secure our systems and worked closely with the relevant authorities.

“There was no loss of court documents, and no unauthorised access to our documents or systems was detected.”