SINGAPORE (July 15): According to a March special report by UK publisher Raconteur, the cost of a DDoS attack has fallen from £35 a day five years ago to just £20 (S$35.74) a day. Stolen credit card data starts at £3 for US cards and goes up to £10 for European Union or UK cards.

Cyber criminals, therefore, have very little to lose and plenty to gain: Hackers for hire, complete with customer feedback ratings, charge £100 for email hacks and £500 or more for corporate espionage or reputational damage.

As the number of cyber criminals increases rapidly, and the nature of their threats intensifies, the market for cybersecurity will grow.

Singtel, StarHub and ST Engineering are some of the emerging players in the fast-growing field of cybersecurity:

Singtel
Over the past couple of years, Singtel has been busy enhancing its cybersecurity capabilities through a series of acquisitions and partnership deals. With its 2015 acquisition of Trustwave, the largest independent managed security services provider in the US, Singtel is now among the world’s largest players in cybersecurity.

Thanks to its acquisitions and partnerships, Singtel now boasts the ability to identify previously-undisclosed software vulnerabilities called zero-day vulnerabilities.

StarHub
Although its role is relatively limited, StarHub, too, has earmarked the cybersecurity sector for some major investments. investments. In May, it launched its Cyber Security Centre of Excellence. Supported by the EDB, the COE will host both industry players and institutes of higher learning.

The COE’s first commercial initiative is a security operations centre that integrates StarHub’s core infrastructure with round-the-clock proactive cyberthreat detection capabilities. Solutions to protect industrial control systems and cloud-based cybersecurity solutions are currently being developed and will be ready in the second half of the year.

ST Engineering
One other local blue chip with a foot in the cybersecurity space is conglomerate Singapore Technologies Engineering. Its electronics division, ST Electronics, has to date designed and built three major cybersecurity operations centres, valued at S$200 million, for Singapore-based customers. It has also built its own 24/7 ST Engineering Cyber Security Operations Centre to watch over the cybersecurity of some 10,000 users. And, it has a training centre called the DigiSAFE Cyber Security Centre.

ST Electronics intends to build on its cybersecurity capabilities so that it can do significantly more than it already does. It has announced a Joint Lab with A*STAR to conduct research into cyber forensics and cyberattack detection, and partnered several universities in cybersecurity research activities. In May, the company also launched the ST Electronics — SUTD Cyber Security Laboratory.

To learn more about the strategies of these emerging cybersecurity players and what it means for their shares, read our full Cover Story in The Edge Singapore (“Defending the digital world”, week of July 18, pg 16), available at newsstands now!