The Taipei city government is planning to install more monitoring equipment and protect the messaging application line after a huge amount of information was leaked in a hacking breach of city computers, according to Taipei Times report.
a bid to avoid further breaches, the officials have decided to install additional monitoring equipment to identify unusual activities on city systems.
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je said that secretariat computers were breached last week, which had revealed a “troublesome” information.
Taipei Department of Information Technology (TDoIT) Commissioner Lee Wei-bin said that in the information breach, numbers of city department heads along with their confidential information had been compromised.
He said that the hacks could allow the hackers to predict the names of secretaries to “friend” commissioners and their staffs. In order to identify all of the members, the management would take a special caution. However, any new member would join the group.
He added that the existing antivirus software on the city secretariat’s computer, which got infected, could not detect the unauthorised access. The management would review the existing divisions between computer systems among the city’s departments, secretariat and the mayoral office.
Although, Taipei city councilors criticised the maximum usage of Line groups for messaging, which creates risk, by the city government, Lee said there was an implicit tradeoff between perfect security and administrative efficiency.
He said that they could not switch to any other messaging software, which is domestically designed and hosted, because it would be more costly and time consuming.
Moreover, Mayor Wen-je, who is used to Line software, has already introduced it extensively within every department.
He added that the department however, was imposing clearer standards for Line usage. The Line groups must have designated members who could take responsibility for policing membership lists.
He said that the city government’s decision would be recorded in official documents which would be to councilors. However, Line conversations would be confidential as telephone calls or private discussions within the city government.