Singapore named 10th biggest cyberattack source in 2019

There was a growth in the number of online skimmers in Southeast Asia.

Singapore remained amongst the hotspots for originating cyberattacks, ranking 10th worldwide with 11 million attacks caused by servers hosted in the Republic in 2019, according to data from Kaspersky Security Network (KSN). It fell by two places from last year.

The number of attacks also skyrocketed 150% from the 2018 figures.

Around 4.66 million web threats in Singapore were also detected, putting the city-state at 157th globally in building up cyber-resilience amongst individuals and businesses, a regression of only one position from last year.

“The wave of cybersecurity breaches – the leakage of personal data pertaining to 2,400 Ministry of Defence personnel, the Sephora hack, the exposure of over 800,000 blood donors’ personal details from the Health Sciences Authority database – are indicative that regardless of the statistics we have here, the Republic continues to be a key target for cybercriminals,” said Kaspersky Southeast Asia general manager, Yeo Siang Tiong.

Kaspersky detected 7.24 million local incidents in 2019 for Singapore, as compared to 6.75 million in the previous year. This includes attacks caused by malware spread via removable USB drives, CDs, and DVDs, and other ‘offline’ methods.

In Southeast Asia, the top four attack vectors of web threats are unintentional downloads of certain programmes or files from the internet, the download of malicious attachments from online e-mail services, browser extensions activity and the download of malicious components or communications with command & control, run by other malware.

Kaspersky noted that there was a growth in the number of online skimmers in the region, using Trojan-PSW (password stealing ware) to steal information like passwords from infected companies.

Meanwhile, web-mining activity fell at the beginning of the year due to declining interest in cryptocurrencies.