The Taipei City Government yesterday said the Investigation Bureau is probing an alleged data theft from 11 computers in the city’s Secretariat Office.
Taipei City Government vice spokesman Ke Yu-an (柯昱安) made the announcement in response to a news report that several of the city government’s computers had been hacked.
The Chinese-language Liberty Times (sister newspaper of the Taipei Times) reported that it received a tip-off about computers at the Secretariat’s International Affairs Division having been hacked and that information about Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je’s (柯文哲) upcoming visit to the US might have been stolen.
Photo: Chang Chia-ming, Taipei Times
The Taipei Department of Information Technology said that it discovered a security problem and a possible theft of administrative documents while it was conducting an information security audit a few days ago, according to the report.
The department immediately alerted the bureau and the Cabinet’s Department of Cyber Security, the report said.
Asked about the report, Ke confirmed that the leak was found on Monday by a department official conducting a regular information security audit.
He refused to reveal more details, as the case in under investigation.
Asked whether the stolen data included Ko’s itinerary for his US trip set to take place from Saturday next week to March 24, Ke said the mayor’s daily schedule for municipal administration is stored on a cloud server, so it could not have been stolen, he said.
His itinerary has not been finalized, Ke said.
The intentions of the hacker or hackers and the source of the attack cannot be disclosed until prosecutors complete their investigation, he said when asked about the cyberattack’s source.
In August last year, hackers were found to have accessed the personal information of more than 2.98 million people stored on the Taipei Department of Health’s servers. The bureau later traced the source of the attack to IP addresses in Shanghai.
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