Singapore’s largest health care group, SingHealth, has suffered a massive knowledge breach that allowed hackers to grab personal data on one.5 million patients who visited SingHealth clinics between could 2015 and july 2018.
SingHealth is the largest health care group in Singapore with 2 tertiary hospitals, 5 national specialty , and eight polyclinics.
According to an consultatory discharged by Singapore’s Ministry of Health (MOH), in conjunction with the non-public knowledge, hackers additionally managed to scarf ‘information on the patient distributed medicines’ of concerning 160,000 patients, together with Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, and few ministers
The taken knowledge includes the patient’s name, address, gender, race, date of birth, and National Registration positive identification (NRIC) numbers.
The Ministry of Health aforesaid the hackers “specifically and repeatedly” targeted the PM’s “personal particulars and data on his patient distributed medication.”
So far there’s no evidence of who was behind the attack, however the MOH declared that the cyber attack was “not the work of casual hackers or criminal gangs.” The native media is additionally speculating that the hack may be a piece of state-sponsored hackers.
Investigations by the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) and the Integrated Health Information System (IHiS) also confirmed that “this was a deliberate, targeted, and well-planned cyberattack.”
PM Comments On SingHealth Healthcare Data Breach
Commenting on the cyber attack through a Facebook post published today, Singapore’s Prime Minister said he believes that the attackers are “extremely skilled and determined” and they have “huge resources” to conduct such cyber attacks repeatedly.
The Singapore government has assured its citizens that no medical records were tampered, or deleted and that no diagnoses, test results, or doctors’ notes were stolen in the attack.
All affected patients will be contacted by the healthcare institution over the next five days.
Since the healthcare sector is part of the critical nation’s infrastructure, alongside water, electricity, and transport, it has increasingly become an attractive target for hackers.
In the past few years, we have reported several hacks and data breaches, targeting the healthcare sector. Just last month, it was revealed that DNA registries of more than 92 million MyHeritage customers were stolen in the previous year by some unknown hackers.
Earlier this year, it was reported that more than half of Norway’s population exposed its healthcare data in a massive data breach that targeted the country’s major healthcare organization.