The U.S. and Singapore signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to formally commit both countries to further cybersecurity cooperation on Aug. 2 during an official U.S. visit by Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
The agreement includes cooperation in regular Computer Emergency Readiness/Response Team (CERT) information exchanges and sharing of best practices, coordination in cyber incident response and sharing of best practices on critical information infrastructure protection, and cybersecurity trends and practices. The U.S. and Singapore also committed in the MoU to conduct joint cybersecurity exercises and collaborate on regional cyber capacity building and cybersecurity awareness-building activities.
The MoU was signed by Suzanne Spaulding, Under Secretary for the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD) at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and David Koh, Chief Executive of the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) at a ceremony at Blair House in Washington, D.C. The U.S. and Singaporean ambassadors to each others’ countries also witnessed the signing, Kirk Wager and Ashok Kumar Mirpuri, respectively.
This MoU is set to last for an initial period of five years.
A joint statement by both countries elaborated on the content of the MoU and joint cyber policy agreements.
The U.S. and Singapore “affirmed their support for the multi-stakeholder approach to Internet governance. We reaffirm, moreover, that the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online. Both sides pledged to deepen their information exchange and sharing, to conduct new bilateral initiatives on critical infrastructure cybersecurity, and to continue to cooperate on cybercrime, cyber defense, and on regional capacity building activities, including through joint exercises, regular exchanges and visits, joint R&D and capability development, regional cyber capacity building programs or initiatives.”
President Obama and Prime Minster Lee also endorsed a common approach to international cyber policy by affirming international law applies to state conduct in cyberspace and committing to promoting voluntary norms of state behavior in cyberspace. They furthermore affirmed countries should not conduct or support online activity that intentionally damages or impairs the use of critical infrastructure to provide public services and no country should support activity intended to prevent national computer security incident response teams (CSIRTS) from responding to cyber incidents or use such teams to enable activity intended to do harm.
The leaders also endorsed policy language the U.S. first agreed to with China in 2015 and has included in later bilateral cybersecurity agreements: “that no country should conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information, with the intent of providing competitive advantages to its companies or commercial sectors.”
“Considering the interdependence in cyberspace between Singapore and the U.S., the borderless nature of transboundary cyber-attacks would have a significant impact on both countries’ critical information infrastructures. This MoU will pave the way towards a secure and resilient cyber space, and we look forward to working together with the U.S. to strengthen cyber security cooperation between our countries,” Koh said at the ceremony.
The CSA highlighted this is the fifth bilateral cybersecurity MoU Singapore has signed, following those with France, the United Kingdom, India, and the Netherlands.