In what’s believed to be the biggest data breach in Singapore’s history, 1.5 million members of the country’s largest healthcare group have had their personal data compromised.

The breach affected SingHealth, Singapore’s biggest network of healthcare facilities. Data obtained in the breach includes names, addresses, gender, race, date of birth and patients’ national identification numbers. Around 160,000 of the 1.5 million patients also had their outpatient medical information accessed by unauthorized individuals. All patients affected by the hack had visited SingHealth clinics between May 1, 2015 and July 4, 2018, Singapore newspaper The Straits Times reports.

“Investigations by the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) and the Integrated Health Information System confirmed that this was a deliberate, targeted and well-planned cyberattack,” a press release from Singapore’s Ministry of Health stated. “It was not the work of casual hackers or criminal gangs.”

The hackers appear to have accessed the sensitive data by compromising a single SingHealth workstation with malware and were then able to obtain privileged account credentials with which they accessed the patient database. The breach was first noticed on July 4 and a police report was filed on July 12.

During a press conference, investigating authorities disclosed that Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was “specifically and repeatedly targeted.”

The Prime Minister elaborated on the incident on his Facebook page:

Source: New feed