Minister of Telecommunication and Digital Infrastructure Harin Fernando says that it is possible that the teenager who was arrested for hacking the President’s official website can be given a scholarship and that it is not out of the question once he is out of juvenile probation.

He stated that if this incident had happened during the former government, that youth would have gone missing. 

Responding to a question from a journalist at a press briefing today, Fernando said that as the minister in charge of ICT, he can say that they were also partly to blame for this incident.  

We have also made a mistake there and that is the President’s official website is not sufficiently protected, he said. 

“The websites of government institutions need to be more secure.” The website has been hosted in an average server and anyone can easily hack it in a basic manner, he said, adding that it had no firewall protection.

The minister conceded that to pull off such a stunt at the age of 17 actually required some skill. 

He stated it is due to understanding this reason that the Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe created a ministry for Digital Infrastructure and give more authority for ICT and allocated Rs 25 billion for the next year. 

He said that out of that Rs 2 billion has been allocated for cyber security alone to establish a security operations center (SOC), which will help put a stop to this hackings. 

Fernando said that cyber security in a major issue and that now a decision has been made to maintain the government websites through the Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) in order to provide better security. 

The minister further said that the youth in question did not think things through and that is why he had done it.