Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – Four major telecommunications companies in Singapore were reportedly the targets of cyber attacks carried out by a hacker group from China. The Singapore government confirmed the attack and said it was involved by the cyber espionage group UNC3886.
Companies targeted include Singtel, StarHub, M1 and Simba Telecom. The hacker group targeted Singapore’s telecommunications infrastructure.
Singapore’s Coordinating Minister for National Security, K.Shanmugam, said the group managed to penetrate and access several systems. He also claimed that the perpetrator did not interfere with services and access personal information, quoted from Tech Crunch, quoted on Sunday (15/2/2026).
He said hackers used sophisticated tools such as rootkits to gain long-term access to systems.
In a joint statement, the telecommunications companies said they continue to face distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and other malware attacks. The company has also implemented multiple layers of protection against existing attacks.
“We implement multi-layered defense mechanisms to protect the network and repair it immediately when problems are detected,” the statement said.
Google-owned Mandiant once linked UNC3886 as a spy group possibly working with China. Reuters also reported that the Chinese government is known to be carrying out cyber espionage operations and preparing an attack close to an invasion of Taiwan, which Beijing continues to deny.
UNC3886 is also known as the group that exploited the zero-day vulnerability. Typically this is done on routers, firewalls and virtualization environments.
The group targets various industries from defense, technology and telecommunications, with target areas in the United States (US) to Asia Pacific.
Foreign attacks go crazy, Indonesia is dragged down
Separately, a cyber spy group suspected of being affiliated with countries in Asia reportedly attacked government computer systems and critical infrastructure in more than 37 countries, including Indonesia.
The attack was uncovered by cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, which found that hackers infiltrated the networks of at least 70 organizations in various countries.
However, the Santa Clara, California-based company refused to identify the hackers’ country of origin.
According to a Bloomberg report, the targets included five national-level law enforcement and border control agencies, three finance ministries, parliament in one country, as well as a top elected official in another.
This espionage operation is said to have taken place over the past year on a very broad scale. Hackers take advantage of this access to spy on emails, financial transactions and communications related to military and police operations.
They also collect sensitive information related to diplomatic issues and are able to hide in victims’ systems for months without being detected.
“They used highly targeted and customized fake emails, as well as known but unpatched security gaps, to gain access to the network,” said Pete Renals, National Security Program Director of Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42.
The research also states that this campaign targets various government agencies in a number of countries, including the Czech Republic, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Malaysia, Mongolia and Indonesia.
(npb/year)
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date:2026-02-15 06:30:00