Singapore public health services suffer cyber-attack

SINGAPORE (AFP): Public healthcare institutions in Singapore were under cyber-attack on Friday but there was no evidence that data had been accessed, a Government-owned agency said.

The so-called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which make websites or network resources unavailable by flooding them with malicious traffic, began on Wednesday, national health IT agency Synapxe said in a statement.

Internet access at public healthcare institutions was disrupted for about seven hours that day before the affected services were restored, according to Synapxe.

The DDos attacks continued on Friday and there may be “occasional disruptions in internet services as a result”, it said, adding investigations were underway.

Synapxe said the measures it had put in place to protect Singapore’s healthcare IT systems “have enabled us to withstand the attacks with no compromise to healthcare data and internal networks”.

But it warned that cyber-attacks were increasing and defences would have to “constantly evolve to keep up with advancements”.