State-actors behind the Singapore cyber hack?

STATE-ACTORS were likely behind Singapore’s biggest ever cyberattack to date, security experts say, citing the scale and sophistication of the hack that hit the medical data of about a quarter of the population.

The city-state announced on Friday that hackers had broken into a government database and stolen the health records of 1.5 million Singaporeans, including Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong who was specifically targeted in the “unprecedented” attack.

Singapore’s health minister said the strike was “a deliberate, targeted, and well-planned cyberattack and not the work of casual hackers or criminal gangs”.

While officials refused to comment on the identity of the hackers citing “operational security”, experts said the complexity of the attack and its focus on high-profile targets like the prime minister pointed to the hand of a state-actor.

“A cyber espionage threat actor could leverage disclosure of sensitive health information . . . to coerce an individual in [a] position of interest to conduct espionage” on its behalf, said Eric Hoh, Asia-Pacific president of cybersecurity firm FireEye.

Hoh told national broadcaster Channel NewsAsia that the attack was an “advanced persistent threat”.

“The nature of such attacks are that they are conducted by nation states using ver y advanced tools,” he said.

“They tend to be well resourced, well-funded and highly sophisticated.”