IT vendor jailed for letting foreign user access Singapore court laptop with 18,000 files

Janarthanan Tamil Kovan, a 42-year-old Indian national employed by Lenovo PCCW Solutions and attached to Singapore's State Courts as an external IT vendor, used his government-issued Lenovo Thinkpad to sit an ISACA certification exam after his personal laptop failed. To bypass the exam's security checks, he installed UltraViewer and gave remote access to a contact named Hari Balan in India. During a ten-minute session on 4 August 2025, the laptop, which stored 18,016 restricted files, was accessed, and five executable files were transferred, three of which altered firewall and antivirus settings.

Although investigations found no evidence of data theft, the breach prompted a forensic review and rotation of all security keys. Janarthanan pleaded guilty to endangering official documents and unauthorized modification under the Official Secrets Act and was sentenced to 28 weeks in jail, while prosecutors had sought up to nine months.