First week of 2012 in SG, a week of mistakes, errors and disruptions

Following in hot pursuit of the recent MRT outages, I bring to you, the first week of 2012 in Singapore

Tuesday – Forgetting domain renewals, something that even young entrepreneurs will never forget

Online payment portal eNets was down on Tuesday rendering citizens unable to pay for government services online.
The eNets portal allows online users to pay for a variety of services such as renewing road tax and paying for season parking on government websites.
The payment platform was down for 11 hours after its operator, Network for Electronic Transfers Singapore (Nets), failed to renew its domain name, the Straits Times reported.

A spokesperson from Nets spoke to Yahoo! Singapore and said “some users experienced difficulties accessing eNets services yesterday morning due to accessibility issues with the enets.sg domain.”
A check on www.centralops.net since showed that the domain name has been renewed for another year until 3 Jan 2013 by Nets.

Services were fully restored by 11am on Tuesday.

Source
And they only renewed it for a year

Tuesday – 3G Outage, Singing Hell?

SingTel posted a Facebook update at 7.57 p.m. Tuesday stating that customers in some northern and western areas of Singapore might experience difficulties using 3G mobile services, and suggested they switched their mobile phones to its 2G network to circumvent the problem as they worked to find a fix. The mobile operator then posted an update at 12.18 a.m. Wednesday saying that all 3G services in affected areas had “normalized” since 9.40 p.m. Tuesday.

“We are continuing to monitor the network closely and we advise customers to switch their phones off and on if they are still having difficulties,” the telco said on its Facebook page. “We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience they have experienced and thank them for their patience.”

However, customers this morning commented on the company’s statement and continued to complain of the service disruption. Wong Kai Leong, for one, said at 10.41 a.m. this morning: “IDA should fine Singtel…what service normalized…it has been down since last night 7 p.m. Now Jan. 4, 2012, 10 a.m…Still down.”

Source

Wednesday – 3G is out again, Singaporeans wonder what they were paying for

SINGAPORE–SingTel reported another disruption to its 3G network last night afflicting some customers in the northern and western parts of the city-state. And while it said services were “normalized” within 40 minutes, some customers still had problems accessing the service this morning. The telco has since stated that the downtime was caused by two separate hardware and software glitches.

Wednesday – Who should you bank on?

SINGAPORE: Police are investigating several cases of unauthorised withdrawals from POSB and DBS Bank accounts allegedly made in Malaysia. Some POSB and DBS Bank customers informed DBS on Wednesday that unauthorized withdrawals were made in Malaysia through their DBS/POSB ATM and debit cards.

One victim, 27-year-old Ms Chen, discovered something was amiss when she checked her bank account online on Wednesday night. “Some transactions done, five times. In total, about $3,000 (withdrawn),” she said. Another affected customer, Ms Li, said an unauthorised withdrawal from her account was made from a shopping centre in Kuala Lumpur. Both victims decided to make a police report.

“In the police station, I actually encountered this Malay woman. She was also making this police report on an (unauthorised) withdrawal of 1,500 ringgit. Then I realized I was not the only one,” said Ms Li. According to the victims, the transactions took place in Malaysia while their ATM cards were with them safely in Singapore.

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Thursday – Taunting the hackers

The hacker group claiming responsibility for yesterday’s hack into a National University of Singapore (NUS) server said that an error message had spurred them on. Australian IT publication, SC magazine, yesterday reported that the message popped up when the group, Team Intra, had initially probed the website.

It has allegedly stated, “If you’re trying to use the SQL error message to dig for juicy information, get lost.” This message spurred the hackers to continue with the attempt. They exploited a vulnerability in the server’s database and gained access to about 70 staff members’ user names, passwords and domain information.

Team Intra then posted the information online, where it was accessible to public.

Source

Just another week on the sunny island of Singapore…