SingTel, FireEye invest S$64m to combat cyberthreats

SINGAPORE — Following increasingly sophisticated large-scale cyberattacks here and globally, Singapore telco SingTel is teaming up with American cybersecurity solutions company FireEye to invest a combined US$50 million (S$63.9 million) over the next five years to provide information technology security services in the Asia-Pacific region.

The investment will go towards the building of two advanced security operation centres in Singapore and Sydney, where cybersecurity professionals will detect and prevent intrusions and monitor systems for threats around the clock using a new system by SingTel called Managed Defence Solution. The partnership will also cover the training of up to 150 cybersecurity professionals to operate the two centres.

Mr Bill Chang, SingTel’s chief executive officer of group enterprise, told reporters from a briefing in Washington: “Over the past 24 months, the whole cyberthreat scene has changed tremendously with the number of very high-level attacks around the world.

“In the United States, we’ve seen attacks on large retailers such as Target, JPMorgan banks, several large enterprises around the world and banks in South Korea. Even the Singapore Government has come under cyberattack. What we are seeing is the increasing pace of such attacks.”

The two companies said the SingTel Managed Defence Solution powered by FireEye aims to detect and resolve breaches in a far shorter time — days or hours, compared with the current median of 229 days before they are discovered and rectified.

Intelligence from SingTel’s own Network Operations Centres, which offer distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) mitigation support, as well as FireEye’s global network of such centres and its Dynamic Threat Intelligence system, which monitors threats in real-time, will be used to do so.

FireEye’s regional advanced threat report showed that for the first half of this year, organisations in the Asia-Pacific region were increasingly targeted, while previously it was mostly the US.

One in two platforms that employ FireEye services in this region captured attacks, compared with about one in three seen elsewhere.

A FireEye report put the average advanced persistent threats exposure in Singapore at 41 per cent, higher than the global average of 36 per cent.

Recent incidents in Singapore include a membership database breach at karaoke chain K Box, where personal details of more than 300,000 customers were put online for public download by hackers. Other incidents include a security loophole on M1’s website that allowed a customer to access the details of other patrons.

At a news conference in Singapore, Mr William Woo, managing director of enterprise data and managed services at SingTel, said the Singapore centre will offer a different value proposition. “We are not looking at only monitoring threats, but also tracking techniques used by attacks. We are also looking at removing them from customers’ networks,” he said.

He said one aim from this partnership is also to build expertise, as security professionals are in short supply and difficult to find and hire.

SingTel and FireEye will be aiming to serve not only the multi-national corporations in the Asia-Pacific, but also the small and medium enterprises that would find it challenging to hire security professionals, he added.

“Our pricing will be competitive,” he said, without elaborating.

With more mobile devices consuming enterprise data and increasingly exposed to malware attacks, SingTel and FireEye will provide threat mitigation for mobile devices as well, Mr Chang said.