CNA Explains: Could a DDoS attack bring down Singapore’s public healthcare system?

SINGAPORE: A distributed denial-of-service on Wednesday took out the websites of Singapore's public healthcare institutions, causing an

The Provost's Chair Professor in NUS' Department of Information Systems and Analytics at the School of Computing said this would disrupt traffic, or requests, from legitimate users. Users would then be unable to load content. A DDoS attack is typically orchestrated in three steps, said cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks.

However on Nov 1, an abnormal surge in network traffic, detected at about 9.15am, managed to circumvent the blocking service and overwhelm the firewalls."Attacks larger than 2 terabits per second have occurred, and attack sizes keep increasing. Huge attacks can overwhelm blocking services and firewalls."

"The attackers may have activist motives where they want to cause disruption and also financial motives. For example, steal data to sell or ask ransom from the organisation." Internal healthcare systems have files such as electronic medical records, which are"mission critical, confidential, time-sensitive and need to be continuously available for patient safety", said Prof Goh, who is from NBS' Division of Information Technology and Operations Management.

For example, a user who is unable to find the contact number of a specialist clinic or ward on the hospital's website would turn to the hospital's phone number for general enquiries. A large volume of calls might overwhelm the contact centre, said Dr Ng. A website must first be able to distinguish an attack from a high volume of normal traffic and respond by intelligently dropping malicious bot traffic, and absorbing the rest of the traffic.

Source: Healthcare Press (healthcarepress.net)

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