Cyber threats continue to grow in scale and sophistication worldwide and unfortunately, the public sector is not immune to cyber attacks.
We have seen recent examples of this trend in the Asia-Pacific region:
- In July 2018, the personal data of 1.5 million healthcare patients in Singapore were stolen from the country’s public healthcare provider SingHealth
- Hong Kong’s Department of Health saw its computing systems hit by ransomware in mid-2018, which left data inaccessible
As cyber threats evolve, governments in Asia-Pacific are introducing new measures for public agencies to step up protection against such attacks.
Singapore, for instance, introduced the new Cybersecurity Act in 2018 which imposes stricter security obligations on the owners of critical information infrastructure (CII). Malaysia, Laos, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam have similar standalone cybersecurity legislation.iii
Public sector IT leaders now face the mandate of closing existing gaps in their network infrastructure and aligning their cybersecurity practices with the latest compliance and regulatory standards.
