Singapore’s public health system has been hacked exposing data of the 1.5 million citizens. The data also has the health information of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. Singapore authorities announced on Friday about the data breach.
“This was a deliberate, targeted and well-planned cyberattack,” Singapore’s Health Ministry and Ministry of Communications and Information said in a statement. “It was not the work of casual hackers or criminal gangs.”
The patients in the hospitals who were admitted or visited the hospital between May 1st 2015 and July 4th, 2018 may be affected. The data consisted of names, address, gender, race and birth dates. The data also consists of which drugs or medicine the patient has been prescribed. The data dispensed in outpatient clinics of 160,000 patients was stolen when the hack took place. The Health Minister of Singapore said that no medical records have been tampered with.
The government of Singapore has also set up an online service which helps the patients check if their information was compromised. “We have lodged a police report on the incident,” said the ministry. As one of the most advanced cities in the world, Singapore faces a high risk of exploitation as they try to integrate technology into life.
The systems were breached due to malware that has affected one of the computers belonging to SingHealth which is one of the state’s major healthcare groups, using that malware the Hackers gained access to the database.
SingHealth has temporarily banned staff from accessing the internet on all 28,000 of its work computers, according to the Straits Times.
The government has warned organisations of cyber-attacks as it has been the target of the international hackers itself.