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Cyber Security Issues – Asia Is The Most Vulnerable To Cyber Attacks

“Cyber Five” – consisting of Singapore, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea – is judged to be nine times more vulnerable to cyber attacks relative to their larger Asian counterparts China and India. Among the Cyber Five, South Korea topped the list with a cyber vulnerability score of 884 (compared to 329 in 2008), with Singapore scoring 399 (compared to 224 in 2008)

Two notable examples for cyber vulnerability happened in Singapore in 2014:

M1 is one of the telecoms service providers in Singapore, and it was alleged that when M1 started taking in online pre-orders for the new Apple iPhone 6, a postgraduate student in Computer Sciences used a cookie modifier plug-in to access forms showing data from other customers, including personal data, prompting M1 to shut down the pre-order web page for 12 hours.

At the same time, it was also alleged that K Box Entertainment Group, a private company which offers karaoke entertainment in Singapore, suffered a serious data security breach, in which the personal data of its customers in its database (numbering more than 300,000 customers) was leaked, as part of a threat by some “hacktivists” protesting against new toll charges.

(Source: Cyber Security Issues in Asia)

In a more recent study, U.S. security company Mandiant indicates that many Asian organisations are badly defended against cyber attacks. Mandiant suggests that the bulk of cyber-attacks in Asia are state-sponsored and target areas with heightened geopolitical tensions, such as the South China Sea.

“We knew responses to cyber-incidents here in Asia often lag those elsewhere, but we didn’t know it was by this much,” Grady Summers, CTO of Mandiant‘s parent company, FireEye

Asian organisations were ill-equipped to defend their networks from attackers because “they frequently lack basic response processes and plans, threat intelligence, technology and expertise.” – Summers added.

The days taken to discover a cyber-attack in 2015

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