[mothered]

Greetings everyone,

Singapore has experienced a cyber attack on It's healthcare system on a very large scale, In fact the biggest. Even Its Prime Minister has been affected. In my experience of exploitation, the medical sector Is amongst the most vulnerable entities and aside from India, Singapore Is certainly an open Invitation to anyone with the skill set In breaching It's (mediocre) security.

All Smart Nation projects, including mandatory contribution to electronic health records, now on hold.

The personal data of 1.5 million patients in Singapore has been hacked in the country’s largest cyber attack, the government announced last week. 160,000 of these patients, including Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, had their outpatient prescription data stolen as well.

The attackers had accessed and copied information such as names, identity card (IC) numbers, addresses, gender, race, and dates of birth. According to investigations by Integrated Health Information Systems, the data was stolen between 27 June and 4 July 2018.

They accessed the records by hacking into the networks of SingHealth, the country’s largest group of healthcare institutions. The 1.5 million records stolen were of patients who had visited SingHealth clinics or hospitals from 1 May 2015 to 4 July 2018.

Source.

[Oni]

Wow, that's bad. Given that there were 1.5 million records, that's almost a third of Singapore's total population (5.6 million).

[Vultra]

Wow, that's scary and especially for the prime minister. I'm happy nothing like this has happened in Australia.
Feels bad for those that have been hacked.

[mothered]

Given that there were 1.5 million records, that's almost a third of Singapore's total population (5.6 million).

Yes, when you look at that part of the equation, It's certainly a significant breach.

I couldn't Imagine the ramifications of subsequent losses on a personal level.

[mickeyhouse]

War against gov's has always been on, who determines who should "store" your records? Should your own gov store your data given they will store it anyways?

[mothered]

War against gov's has always been on, who determines who should "store" your records? Should your own gov store your data given they will store it anyways?

In some cases, data storage on a personal level Is Inevitable.

The essentials being electric & gas bill, cell phone account, water bill etc- they're all required to store personal Information for verification and authentication purposes. You can do your utmost best to remain anonymized, but the question always remains- how secure Is the entity holding (essentially) your Identity?

[mickeyhouse]

Being inevitable doesn't mean it's acceptable, people even on their countries should have the right to accept or no data storage even if made by the government, data = money or even power, look at google the biggest data aggregator... Data rules should change on countries, no system is perfect.

[mothered]

Being inevitable doesn't mean it's acceptable

It's acceptable to store It, but not to distribute It due to breaches In lack of security and the like.

Ultimately, It's your choice. If you can do without power (electricity), water and gas, don't sign up to these entities. It's your call how to distribute your personal Information, but not how It's handled by those who store It.

[Dupersayinz]

They should have hired a red team!

[mothered]

They should have hired a red team!

Yes, they definitely should've Implemented better security measures.

It's very difficult from a security standpoint- you need to exhaust every possible avenue, patch and secure every (known) vulnerability and Implement corrective measures to help prevent future attacks. From a hacker's perspective, all you need Is one gateway and you're In.