CYBER SECUIRTY
Deepening collaborations for cybersecurity - Highlights from the Singapore international cyber week 2021 By Jane Lo Singapore Correspondent
Held in a hybrid format during the second year of the pandemic, the highly anticipated Singapore International Cyber Week 2021 (SICW, 4th – 8th October 2021) opened to a global audience that saw more than 2000 delegates and speakers participating globally, including government ministers, cyber principals and heads of agencies and leaders from industry and academia. The 6th edition of SICW continued the momentum of conversations on emerging digital opportunities and threats, cybersecurity policies and norms, Internet of Things (IoT) and Operational Technology (OT) security, and unveiled the latest Singapore cybersecurity strategy to address new and emerging cyber threats.
Singapore Cybersecurity Strategy 2021 – Consensus building and deepening collaboration. First launched in October 2016 by the Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong at SICW 2016, the Singapore Cybersecurity Strategy 2021 was released by Mr Teo Chee-Hean (Senior Minister and Coordinating Minister for National Security) at SICW 2021. As global digital revolution and innovations accelerate, “connecting more people, bringing in new services, and rolling them out fast, bring added risks”, said Mr Teo, such as the exploitation of “vulnerabilities in what should be “high trust” components” in the recent high-profile SolarWinds supply chain attacks.
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While the updated strategy “articulates Singapore’s approach to safeguarding our wider cyberspace in an increasingly complex environment,” he said, it also “acknowledges the need for consensus-building and deepening collaboration.” The 2017 WannaCry attack encapsulated today’s era where the global nature of cyber threat means that no one can combat it alone. Threat actor groups have also recognised the benefits of working together by sharing intelligence and tools to stage attacks of ever-increasing sophistication. Cybercrime models such as ransomware-as-a-service or phishing-as-a-service point to a trend of increased collaboration between bad actors and coordination across specialities. Little if at all programming skills are required to launch an attack – a crucial factor behind the alarming rise of ransomware attacks. Moreover, such collaborations extend beyond the cybercrime ecosystem. The ease with which threat actor groups navigate between the Dark Web and surface web economy, commodity and customised malware, desktop, mobile and network attacks, have broken traditional attributions models. Targeted attacks are no longer the preserve of nation state actors - cybercriminals can just as easily disrupt a critical infrastructure with a ransomware attack. Recent Altdos incidents that targeted South-East Asian businesses ranging from electronics to furniture stores, and
