Why Singapore’s Digital Ambitions Rest on Autonomous, AI-Driven Cyber Defence

Based on an article by Sanjay Aurora, Managing Director, Asia-Pacific, Darktrace

When Singapore's government presented its 2021 Budget, it recognised technology as central to the country's economic health. Sanjay Aurora, Darktrace's managing director for Asia-Pacific, calls that emphasis on digital transformation and innovation world-leading, and essential as the country works its way out of recession.

In his view, the success of the transformation, and Singapore's capacity to seize new opportunities, depends to an extraordinary degree on how strong its cyber defences are. He praises the government's readiness to invest in next-generation defensive technology as admirable and as the key to keeping ahead of the attackers businesses now face. What he wants to see above all is investment in autonomous defences driven by artificial intelligence.

SolarWinds as the final warning

Attacks have multiplied during the global pandemic and grown far more sophisticated. Aurora describes the SolarWinds Orion compromise as the last canary in the coal mine. Its victims ranged from Asian organisations to major US Fortune 500 companies and government departments. The past decade has brought a steady stream of compromises and data breaches, but this one, he argues, shows how cyber attacks are increasingly used in geopolitical conflict, and how exposed even the best-equipped national superpowers are to adversaries with deep resources and imagination.

He sees the attack as the marker of a new era, one in which thousands of companies find themselves caught in the path of dangerous state campaigns. After it, he says, countries must entirely rethink how they detect and defend against ever more novel operations run by nation-states and cybercriminals.

The Singapore government has pledged to foster a "strong spirit of innovation", driven by technological progress and a reshaping of global supply chains. Aurora argues that this commitment depends on learning from these quiet but lethal campaigns, from which businesses in Singapore are not exempt.

Walls no longer work

Defeating the coming generation of threats, Aurora writes, cannot be done by putting walls around companies and critical organisations. That is not even possible. Today's digital environments are more dynamic and sprawling than any before, and complex global supply chains present many more weak points that attackers can probe on the way to compromising systems. As Minister Heng Swee Keat has noted, these supply chains will only grow more complex, and a technologically advanced world is a playground for hackers.

Aurora sees encouraging signs that the government accepts traditional security is no longer sufficient. In October 2020, the 2020 Cybersafe Masterplan gave AI a leading place in detecting security threats, particularly those aimed at key infrastructure and 5G broadband networks.

He treats that as an important first step in accepting that AI is vital to Singapore's digital future, but says it must go further. AI varies in quality, and many security products marketed as AI-powered are only analytical tools that produce reports once an incident is over.

The case for self-learning defence

For Aurora, AI's greatest contribution to cybersecurity is fully autonomous, intelligent defence. Such a system sits at the core of an organisation and teaches itself, learning each organisation's distinct pattern of life and taking autonomous, strategic action to halt unusual behaviour immediately. He calls this the future of the field: a cyber ecosystem that defends and heals itself. Human effort alone can no longer scale to the problem, he argues. The world already faces serious shortages of cyber skills, and even millions of newly trained people could not detect or respond to the silent, deadly attacks now arriving in huge numbers at computer speed.

According to Aurora, Singaporean companies are ahead in facing up to this. He names blue-chip organisations including M1 Limited, Shook Lin & Bok LLP, International Baccalaureate and AWWA, as well as several in healthcare and pharmaceuticals such as Santen Pharmaceutical, as leaders in adopting Autonomous Cyber AI that fights threats for them at computer speed.

Global Travel, which he describes as Singapore's leading travel management solutions company, relies on AI to defend it autonomously around the clock. Its general manager, James Chua, said AI-powered cyber defence is the only technology equipped to handle the new generation of attacks, which are quieter, stealthier and more dangerous. For the company, he said, deploying technology that shuts threats down within seconds of their appearance is mission-critical.

Aurora says the technology has been vital for thousands of organisations worldwide in keeping operations running through the pandemic, when staff shortages and a flood of attacks left some unable to function. Across Asia-Pacific today, he writes, AI responds autonomously to a new threat every six seconds and carries out more than 150,000 investigations each week.

What comes after SolarWinds

He is certain that the full extent of the SolarWinds damage has yet to emerge, and that the access it gave will prepare the ground for carefully planned disruption and sabotage spreading from the public sector into the private one, which he calls inevitable.

Aurora believes Singapore is at the front of the defensive arms race, with many organisations already relying on Autonomous Cyber AI to protect their digital operations from threats well beyond what human teams can handle. Facing more capable nation-state actors and the reality of cyber warfare, he says the country is ready to make fuller use of AI applied intelligently and meaningfully, fighting on people's behalf in a partnership between humans and machines that he sees as the foundation of cybersecurity. In his assessment, Singapore's success as a Smart Nation and the completion of its digital transformation depend on it.