Massive cyber attack on 1.5m patients in Singapore

There has been a “deliberate, targeted and well-planned” cyber attack on Singapore’s government health database, whereby personal information of about 1.5m people, including that of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, has been stolen.

The breach at SingHealth — Singapore’s largest healthcare group —  was aimed at patients who visited clinics between May 2015 and July 4 this year.

“I am personally affected, and not just incidentally,” Lee said in a Facebook post, adding that the attackers might have been “hunting for some dark state secret, or at least something to embarrass me”.

“My medication data is not something I would ordinarily tell people about, but there is nothing alarming in it,” he added.

“Investigations by the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) and the Integrated Health Information System (IHiS) confirmed that this was a deliberate, targeted and well-planned cyberattack. It was not the work of casual hackers or criminal gangs,” the ministry added.