SingHealth, the largest healthcare group in Singapore was targeted by hackers recently, leaking personal as well as outpatient medication details of nearly a quarter of the state’s population. The disclosed data includes health details of Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and personal data of more than 1.5 million people and medicine dispense details of about 160,000 people.
The Singaporean Prime Minister was quick to respond to the incident and expressed his embarrassment through his Facebook post.
“My Medication data is not something I would ordinarily tell people about, but there is nothing alarming in it”, said Lee Loong.
Lee expressed his anguish over the situation and stated that some state-funded actors should have caused the attack to know the dark state secrets or at least something to embarrass the nation and its leaders.
As per the sources reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders, the attack took place just after a fortnight after the nation hosted a summit between the US and North Korea to restore peace between the nations. And the hackers are said to have accessed all the data of the patients who visited SingHealth between May 1st, 2015 and July 8th, 2018. This includes their names, National Registration Identity card Information(NRIC), addresses, gender, race, and date of births which were illegally accessed and copied.
It is said that the attack was identified on July 4th and after carrying investigations till July 9th, it was confirmed that the network was under attack. On July 10th of this year a forensic investigation was started and on July 20th i.e today an official statement on this incident was issued.
Security analysts say that this could be the largest cybercrime which took place across the Asia Pacific in recent times.
What’s more unenviable about the attack is that in Feb this year, Singapore invested heavily in ramping up its cyber defenses against almost all sophisticated digital attacks prevailing in the cyber landscape.
The perpetrators are yet to be identified, but the Prime Minister of Singapore has disclosed that the attack was deliberate and was well planned and was not carried out by casual hackers or groups.
Note 1-The Monetary Authority of Singapore(MAS) has instructed all the financial institutions in the region to carry out user verification on a stringent note before they could undertake any transaction from a customer.
Note 2- SingHealth holds the largest group of healthcare organizations in Singapore. It consists of 4 public hospitals across the island and has 5 national specialty centers and a network of 9 polyclinics.
