Two Control Yuan members are to investigate the deletion of about 424,000 news clips at Public Television Service (PTS), in an incident that exposed cybersecurity issues at government agencies.
PTS on Tuesday said that a contractor on Feb. 8 mistakenly deleted news clips produced between 2017 and January from its digital archive.
Although more than 320,000 clips were recovered by Friday last week, nearly 80,000 were lost, the network said.
Photo: Hsieh Chun-lin, Taipei Times
As PTS failed to prepare an offsite data backup system, Control Yuan members Fan Sun-lu (范巽綠) and Lai Ting-ming (賴鼎銘) are to investigate whether the government had adequately overseen the network’s operations, and conducted regular checks of its management and contractors, they said in a statement.
In a legislative hearing on Wednesday, Minister of Culture Lee Yung-te (李永得) said he had asked the Cabinet’s Department of Cyber Security and the National Communications Commission (NCC) to form a team with his ministry to investigate the incident.
NCC Vice Chairman and spokesman Wong Po-tsung (翁柏宗) said that the NCC would meet with PTS’ head of cybersecurity to learn the cause of the incident and create measures to prevent it from happening again.
PTS, categorized as key infrastructure under the Cyber Security Management Act (資通安全管理法), reported the incident to the NCC within an hour, citing problems in its data backup facilities, Wong said.
He added that the investigation would seek determine how the backup system malfunction resulted in the deletion of so many files.
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