Singapore jails IT manager over risk of court data leak — Channel NewsAsia
In Singapore, 42-year-old IT manager Janarthanan Tamil Kovan was sentenced to 28 weeks in prison after he installed remote-access software on a work laptop containing more than 18,000 State Courts files. As reported by Channel NewsAsia, the man pleaded guilty to endangering the security of Singapore court and government documents, as well as to unauthorized computer modification.
Remote access to a work laptop
Janarthanan worked as a service delivery manager at Lenovo PCCW Solutions and, from June 2024, was engaged as an external IT contractor for the State Courts. He led a cloud systems team servicing various court systems and applications.
On August 4, 2025, the man decided to take an ISACA examination for Certified Information Security Manager certification on the Lenovo ThinkPad work laptop issued to him. His personal computer had a faulty screen. However, the work device did not pass the security check before the examination.
Janarthanan then contacted an acquaintance named Hari Balan, with whom he had previously communicated on WhatsApp about IT courses. According to court materials, this interlocutor's IP address was recorded in India. At his request, Janarthanan installed the UltraViewer program and provided the details for a remote connection.
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Files and security check
The remote connection lasted approximately 10 minutes. At the time, 18,016 State Courts files were stored on the laptop. Almost all were classified as restricted and non-sensitive, while one other file was categorized as restricted with a high level of sensitivity. The documents contained login credentials, secret keys and information about the court network architecture.
During the remote-access session, five executable files were transferred to the laptop. Windows Defender isolated two of them, while the other three were run and changed the firewall and antivirus protection settings. Janarthanan said that his acquaintance explained this as an attempt to bypass the device's protections in order to pass the pre-examination check.
The security system detected the files, after which employees of the SEED team contacted Janarthanan. According to the court, he initially denied using UltraViewer and later deleted most files from the downloads folder, browser history and the program folder containing activity logs. In September 2025, he confessed.
The investigation found no unauthorized extraction of data from the laptop. At the same time, the files could potentially have been used to gain unauthorized access to systems containing confidential information, including court case data and judges' notes. The State Courts replaced the security keys affected by the incident, changed passwords, and reviewed system logs and network traffic.
