Feature
TECHNOLOGY
Statesponsored mayhem Governments are increasingly using their investments in cyber initiatives to go on the offensive. Is it time to sue for peace? BY ARTHUR PIPER
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uring the summer of 2018, a major cyberattack on Singapore’s largest healthcare group netted the personal details of over oneand-a-half million patients, including the country’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong. The data raid on SingHealth is the biggest yet in Singapore’s history and could have been the result of a sophisticated and carefully planned state-sponsored sting, according to The Telegraph newspaper in the UK. “It was not the work of casual hackers or criminal gangs,” Singapore’s Health Ministry told journalists. “The attackers specifically and repeatedly targeted prime minister Lee Hsien Loong’s personal particulars and information on his outpatient dispensed medicines.” The attack is just one of many cybercrimes attributed to state-sponsored actors – a fancy name for hackers paid by a country’s government to steal information or disrupt events and democratic elections. Just as the perpetrators of the so-called Olympic Destroyer virus – which shut down the website of the winter games in March – have not been traced, so the authors of the recent Singapore
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Cyber is increasingly political, with private sector companies being caught in the crossfire of internal and geopolitical activities
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