Singapore Telecommunications Limited or SingTel, is a multinational telecommunications conglomerate in Singapore, and one of the four major telecommunication companies in the country.
As the largest mobile network operator in Singapore, it has around 4.1 million subscribers. If combined with its subsidiaries, SingTel has around 640 million subscribers, according to its report at the end of financial year 2017.
Singtel has also expanded its business to venture out of Singapore, and bought shares in many other operators in other countries.
Among them, SingTel is the full owner of Optus, which is Australia's second largest telecommunication, owns 40% of Bharti Airtel, the second largest carrier in India, owns 35% of Indonesia's Telkomsel, and owns 23% of Thailand's Advanced Info Service.
With its huge reach, SingTel is an alluring target for hackers.
And this happened to be true, as SingTel that controls significant market share in various countries, has been hit with a cybersecurity attack.
According to SingTel in a media statement:
"Our priority is to work directly with customers and stakeholders whose information may have been compromised to keep them supported and help them manage any risks. We will reach out to them at the earliest opportunity once we identify which files relevant to them were illegally accessed."
Singtel revealed in a statement that it was notified by a third-party the company relied on.
The company Accellion said that its file-sharing system, called FTA (File Transfer Appliance), had been breached by unidentified hackers. SingTel uses FTA as a standalone system and used it to share information within the organization and with external stakeholders.
Accellion's FTA was a 20-year file-sharing product that was nearing the end of its lifecycle.
The vendor said in its own press release that it was "made aware of a zero-day vulnerability" in mid-December, and has released a fix for the initial exploit within 72 hours and continued to release patches to close each vulnerability discovered in the following weeks.
Accellion on January 23 pushed out another advisory citing another vulnerability, against which the patch rolled out on December 27 was ineffective, according to Singtel.
Because of this, SingTel "immediately" took the FTA system offline, and started investigating the impact of the cybersecurity attack.
The company said on February 9 that "files were taken" and customer data "may have" been compromised.
"Accellion informed thereafter that our system could have been breached and this had likely occurred on January 20 January," said a Singtel spokesperson. "We continued to keep the system offline and activated cyber and criminal investigations that confirmed the January 20 date. Given the complexity of the investigations, it was only confirmed on February 9 that files were taken."
Singapore's Cyber Security Agency and local police have been notified.
The company added that the case "is an isolated incident involving a standalone third-party system. Our core operations remain unaffected and sound."
Singtel also said it was reviewing its processes and file-sharing protocols to "further enhance our information security posture".
It noted that due to the "complexity of the investigations", its impact assessment would take some time. It said it would contact those that might have had their data illegally downloaded.
According to Accellion, fewer than 50 of its customers, including SingTel, were affected by the incident, noting that it had added monitoring and alerting tools to identify anomalies associated with these attack vectors.
This incident is yet another case of companies being hit by cyberattacks because they lacked, or had inadequate security systems in place to support remote working.
