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SingHealth hacking incident complicates work routine of staff

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Staff at Singapore's public healthcare institutions have had to find alternative methods for routine tasks since their computers were temporarily delinked from the Internet last week.

At SingHealth institutions, this means that deaths have to be registered at police stations for now, while new parents are requested to register births directly with the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority of Singapore.

The preventive measures were taken after the authorities revealed last Friday that a cyber attack had compromised the personal information of around 1.5 million SingHealth patients.

All three healthcare groups had their Internet access delinked by Sunday night.

The move is meant to be temporary, but the Health Ministry did not say how long it will last.

Mr Tan Jack Thian, who is group chief operating officer for SingHealth, said the changes have resulted in some inconveniences to patients.

"For example, telehealth services which require Internet access are temporarily paused," he said.

"These are interim measures, as laptops that can access the Internet are progressively redeployed to the various departments over the next few days."

Staff at SingHealth institutions are also having to use a separate, shared workstation with Internet access when carrying out tasks such as checking patients' insurance information when they are admitted.

The National Healthcare Group (NHG) said its cashless payment systems were affected by the move but the problem has since been rectified.

Mr Ho Khai Leng, NHG's group chief information officer, said that some of its staff's work processes have also been affected by theInternet separation.

He added that there are IT staff stationed onsite at each of its institutions to manage issues.

Meanwhile, the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore informed the Securities Investors Association (Singapore), or Sias, yesterday that it had suffered a security breach in 2013, which compromised and leaked the data of about 70,000 members.

The data included names, NRIC numbers and telephone numbers.

"Nevertheless, the records were not tampered with, that is, no records were amended or deleted," said Sias general manager Richard Dyason, in an e-mail to members.

Mr David Gerald, Sias' founder and chief executive officer, told The Business Times: "We are truly very sorry this had happened even though we took precautionary measures. We are now offline. Sias will take all measures necessary to protect the data and avoid such a breach." - ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY LOW DE WEI

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