Tan Hong Tat Paul

Paul is the Director of Cybersecurity in the Defence Science & Technology Agency (DSTA) of Singapore. The DSTA is a statutory board under the Ministry of Defence responsible for harnessing and exploiting science and technology to meet the defence and national security needs of Singapore. These span the entire spectrum of capability planning, development and sustainment of weapon systems to ensure that the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) continue to be a formidable fighting force.

Paul’s Programme Centre is responsible for the development and integration of advanced cybersecurity solutions used by both admin and command and control systems. Prior to his appointment, Paul was holding the Dir(Cyber Technology) appointment. Concurrently he was also the Head Capability Development (CyberSOC).

Paul has spent over 20 years as a career cybersecurity practitioner and has grown from a developer to become the Dir Cybersecurity in DSTA today. Throughout his career, he has led various teams in the design, development and implementation of key security solutions vital to the secured operations of the SAF. These solutions (ie Security Ops Centres, Secure Gateways, VPNs, Analytics and Advanced scanners) have proven to be operationally robust and have withstood repeated tests over the years.

Besides technical solutions, Paul works closely with the SAF/MINDEF to contribute to the development of security policies and directives that help ensure that cybersecurity is considered not only at design stage, but also throughout its operations and lifecycle. Today, these processes and frameworks have been institutionalised as practice and help to ensure a consistently strong application of security despite the wide variety of complex systems.