Singapore International Cyber Week – Opening address by Mr K Shanmugam, Senior Minister, Coordinating Minister for National Security, and Minister for Home Affairs

Mr Amandeep Singh Gill, United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Special Envoy for Digital and Emerging Technologies

Mrs Josephine Teo, Minister for Digital Development and Information, and Minister-in-charge of Cybersecurity and Smart Nation

Ms Gwenda Fong, Commissioner of Cybersecurity, and Chief Executive of the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore

Ministers,

Excellencies,

Distinguished Guests,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

1. Very good morning to every one of you, and welcome to the Singapore International Cyber Week.

Cyber Threat Landscape

2. In December of last year, 2025 – in the middle of winter – there were coordinated cyberattacks against Poland.

3. The attackers targeted more than 30 wind and solar energy installations and a combined heat-and-power plant that was supplying heat to nearly 500,000 people.

4. In April of 2025, South Korea’s largest mobile carrier reported significant data breach. Sensitive data of nearly 27 million user records had been compromised.

5. Last year, at the Cyber Week opening, I spoke about UNC3886, an APT that was, even then at that point when I was speaking, attacking critical infrastructure in Singapore. Sophisticated tools had been used to gain access to our telecom networks.

6. In response to this, we in Singapore mounted Operation CYBER GUARDIAN. It was Singapore's largest cyber response to date. It involved putting together a lot of cyber defenders from the Government sector working closely with the telcos and partners.

7. These are not isolated incidents.

8. APTs have both the intent and the capability to persistently target critical infrastructure for both espionage and disruption.

9. All of us have to plan on the basis that we will face such attacks with increasing frequency


Preparing for AI-Enabled Cyber Threats

10. Rapid advances in AI have made the situation even more challenging.

11. AI allows actors to operate with greater speed, greater scale, and greater sophistication.

12. AI agents can be manipulated to carry out unintended actions that compromise essential systems.

13. AI-enabled cyber threats are really not a matter of “if”, but “when”.

14. We cannot resist AI adoption. But we need to try and adopt it in a safe and secure manner.

15. Globally, agentic AI is advancing faster than safeguards can keep up.

16. We have already seen AI agents autonomously carrying out unauthorised tasks, accessing systems that were not meant to be accessed.

17. Last month, Australia disclosed that an AI agent had gained unauthorised access to non-public data on a government portal.

18. There will be more incidents, more attacks.

19. All of us have to shore up our cyber defences and our resilience to recover when attacks happen.

More Proactive Defence

20. Singapore will seek to act earlier, act at national scale, and act at the speed of the threat.

21. This shift is an important part of Singapore’s Cybersecurity Strategy 2026 which we are launching today.

22. The Strategy is broader than how national cyber defence has been built so far.

23. It will cover how we will strengthen our critical infrastructure and wider cyberspace; build capabilities for AI and quantum; deepen our global partnerships; and invest in our cybersecurity ecosystem and workforce.

24. Today, I will just make three points about the shift to a more proactive defence.

Act Earlier

25. First, we have to act earlier.

26. Traditional cyber defence relies heavily on protecting systems, periodic assessments, and responding when something has gone wrong.

27. But adversaries are continuously looking for vulnerabilities and trying to establish persistent access.

28. Our defence therefore has to be continuous. We need to consistently monitor and hunt for threats, identifying weaknesses before adversaries do so, and correcting them quickly.

Act at Scale

29. Second, we have to act on a national scale.

30. Operation CYBER GUARDIAN, which we mobilised to deal with UNC3886, taught us very important lessons.

31. A sophisticated attacker does not see the Government and telcos as separate. They are not separate silos.

32. They look across the systems and look for the weak point.

33. Our national defence has to look across the system too.

34. Government and industry have to work closely together in our response.

35. For that purpose, we have established the National Cybersecurity Command Centre, or NC3.

36. NC3 is CSA’s operations hub for national cyber defence.

37. It will help our cyber defences in three ways.

38. First, it will give us a national cyber situational picture of both vulnerabilities and threats.

39. NC3 supports the continuous monitoring of critical infrastructure systems.

40. It will also allow cyber defenders to put together valuable threat information from Government, from CII owners, cybersecurity companies and international partners.

41. Second, it will help us detect threat actors, APTs, earlier.

42. This will be done through proprietary threat detection systems and privileged intelligence.

43. That will allow us to act earlier, before the attackers can cause us serious harm.

44. Third, it will allow us to mount an effective national response to major cyber threats, similar to Operation CYBER GUARDIAN, through AI-enabled coordination systems.

45. This is going to be Singapore’s model of cyber defence.

46. We will also provide greater protection upstream.

47. The Government will help to develop a national Protective Domain Name Service, or PDNS. When someone tries to connect to a domain which is known to be malicious, the PDNS can stop the connection before the threat reaches the user. This will potentially help to reduce exposure to phishing, scams, malware and other cyber threats.

Act at Speed

48. Third, we have to act at the speed of the threat.

49. If AI allows attackers to identify vulnerabilities and conduct attacks more quickly, then the defenders will have to use AI too.

50. The Government will progressively deploy AI across our national cyber defence operations, including within NC3 and the Government Cyber Security Operations Centre.

51. We will also work with industry and technology partners to speed up the adoption of AI-enabled cyber defence capabilities. This will be done across our critical sectors.

52. We already have capabilities being developed across Government.

53. CSA has developed AI tools to automate discovery and mapping of exposed assets and vulnerabilities, and to assist cybersecurity specialists in testing complex vulnerabilities in web applications.

54. GovTech uses AI agents to accelerate the discovery of vulnerabilities and security testing.

55. We will take a pragmatic approach. We will not need to develop our own AI models for every use case.

56. What we really need is the capability to evaluate the best available models and to adapt them to our own needs.

57. We will therefore invest in AI harness engineering, which will give us the flexibility to choose between AI models, and to securely integrate the best available ones with the tools, the data and the workflows which cyber defenders need.

Competition and Cooperation

58. Even with our shift to more a proactive defence, it is not going to be possible to prevent all attacks.

59. That makes cooperation even more important.

60. We should be realistic about the environment we are in.

61. There will be more strategic competition particularly over critical technologies like AI.

62. Countries will act to safeguard their national interests. Singapore will do the same.

63. But it is dangerous if every country’s response to strategic competition is to just build inward and to act independently.

64. This will break up the digital ecosystem that we all depend on.

65. We are already seeing signs of this in advanced technology domains, such as AI, semiconductors, and telecomms.

66. Cybersecurity is inherently a collective challenge. Cyber threats cross borders. Technology and infrastructure are spread across jurisdictions. No country, however capable, can secure the digital domain on its own.

67. There will be competition but it does not have to displace all cooperation.

68. We may not be able to agree on everything. We will not agree on everything.

69. But it is important that we build up practical cooperation to exchange information, respond to incidents, tackle common threats, and reduce the risk of wider instability.

70. This cooperation cannot be just between governments.

71. Much of the infrastructure we depend on is owned and operated by industry.

72. Much of the technology, threat intelligence and technical expertise needed to defend the digital domain also sit outside Government.

73. This is why Singapore’s Cybersecurity Strategy aims to advance cooperation between governments, industry, academia and the wider cybersecurity community.

74. This is our vision for Singapore International Cyber Week as a catalyst for encouraging cooperation.

75. We come from different countries, different industries, and we have different interests.

76. This week, SICW gives us a platform to speak candidly about those differences, and identify areas where practical cooperation remains possible.

77. We must have these conversations, which at times may be difficult. And we have to have them now, so that we can try and avoid more difficult consequences later.

Conclusion

78. To conclude, Singapore will continue to build up our resilience by strengthening our own capabilities and safeguarding our national interests.

79. But resilience does not mean retreating from the world. Far from it.

80. For Singapore, resilience is what gives us the confidence to remain connected to the world.

81. This is ultimately what Singapore’s Cybersecurity Strategy is about: protecting the trust which our digital economy and society depend on, and preserving our ability to remain open and connected in the face of a rapidly changing world.

82. I wish every one of you a fruitful Singapore International Cybersecurity Week as we work towards a secure, stable, and resilient cyberspace.

83. Thank you.