Healthcare providers in Singapore impacted by DDoS attack
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A major service disruption has been attributed to a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, impacting multiple public healthcare providers in Singapore. Synapxe, the national healthtech agency overseeing IT functions for the nation's public healthcare system, reported ongoing attacks. This expansive network consists of 46 public healthcare entities, such as hospitals and polyclinics, alongside 1,400 community partners, including nursing homes and general practitioners.
The attack began on 1st of November with an overwhelming number of requests blocking legitimate access to hospital websites. The interruption to online services lasted approximately seven hours, rendering services reliant on internet access, such as email and staff productivity tools, unusable. By 5:15 PM local time on the same day, most functionalities were restored.
Synapxe has confirmed that, despite the attack, there has been no compromise of public healthcare data or the internal networks. Mission-critical systems, including those needed for clinical services and patient records, remained operational.
On the morning of the attack, Synapxe detected an unusual increase in network traffic that bypassed existing security measures designed to halt suspicious activities. Despite a multi-layered defense strategy and redundancies for system resilience, such as backups and subscription services to preempt abnormal traffic, the firewalls were eventually overwhelmed by the attack.
In response, Synapxe coordinated with their service providers to implement countermeasures to filter the excessive traffic, allowing legitimate requests to resume and gradually restoring affected services.
The ongoing nature of the DDoS attacks suggests the potential for future intermittent service disruptions. Synapxe is actively investigating the incident in collaboration with Singapore's cybersecurity regulator, the Cyber Security Agency (CSA).
