SINGAPORE is now home to one of three cybersecurity facilities worldwide which will alert Web surfers if cybercrooks attempt to direct them to duplicitous sites.

The other two facilities are housed in Zurich in Switzerland, and San Jose in California.

All three are modelled after the security system used by the United States' federal government.

Each facility is a 3m by 2m room and fortified with five levels of protection, each being harder to penetrate than the last.

The Singapore facility is at an undisclosed location in the National University of Singapore, which is hosting it on behalf of the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore.

The facilities will offer protection for websites under a recently launched Internet protocol called the Domain Name System Security Extension (DNSSEC).

The new standard aims to prevent hacking and cybercrimes, such as phishing and identity theft, by ensuring that websites visited by Internet surfers are genuine.

The system verifies websites through unique signatures, thus "reducing the risk that they have been misdirected to a different site by cybercriminals", said Mr Rod Backstrom, head of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).

DNSSEC will check that the signature of a website matches the signature provided by the website's owner. If the signatures do not match, a visitor will be alerted to the inconsistency.

The service is absolutely free of charge for use worldwide, for countries that sign up.

Singapore is in the process of gearing itself up to adopt DNSSEC and users here will have to wait a little longer before they get a glimpse of the system, according to Mr Lim Choon Sai, a director at IDA.

"We are currently testing the system but it will be launched by January of next year," he said.

The three facilities provide redundancy, so that if one of them fails due to natural disasters or intrusions, there will be no interruption to the service. It also ensures that no one government will be able to manipulate the system for their own purposes.

Mr Jeff Moss, vice-president and chief security officer of Icann said: "Part of the reason we chose Singapore and Switzerland is that these are countries that have a long reputation of neutrality and independence."

He added that the system was developed to maximise its transparency. Each facility has three security cameras publishing a continuous video-surveillance stream to the Internet, allowing anyone to view all three facilities at any point in time.

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