Welcome Address by Ms Gwenda Fong, Commissioner of Cybersecurity and Chief Executive, CSA at the 11th Edition of the SICW Opening Ceremony 13 October 2026

Mr K Shanmugam, Senior Minister, Coordinating Minister for National Security, and Minister for Home Affairs,

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

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

Ministers, Excellencies, Distinguished Guests, Colleagues and Friends,

1.                A very good morning, and a very warm welcome to the 11th Singapore International Cyber Week. To our friends and partners  that have travelled a long way to join us, welcome to Singapore.

2.                This is my first SICW as Chief Executive of the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore and Commissioner of Cybersecurity. It is indeed my privilege to welcome all of you here today.

3.                The theme for this year’s SICW is, “Cyber at a Crossroads: Shaping the New Cyber Order”. This theme reflects the profound changes taking place in our digital world, and the choices we must make in responding to them.

4.                For Singapore, these choices are particularly consequential. We are a small country whose success has been built on being open and connected to the world. Our economy and society depend on digital infrastructure, technology platforms and supply chains that extend well beyond our shores.

5.                This connectivity has brought us enormous opportunities, but also exposes us to risks beyond our borders. The threats we face span different systems, different organisations and different countries. No single party has complete visibility of the entire threat landscape.

No One Sees the Whole Picture

6.                Governments, infrastructure operators, cloud providers and cybersecurity companies each have visibility of different parts of the threat landscape. Each sees something important, but no one sees everything.

7.                Sophisticated cyber campaigns illustrate why this matters. Threat actors can operate across multiple systems and networks, often over extended periods. What appears to be an isolated incident to one organisation may in fact be part of a much larger campaign.

8.                Understanding these threats requires us to bring together information and expertise from different sources. And assembling the picture is only half the challenge. We must do so quickly enough to act before the adversary does.

AI Is Changing the Picture

9.                Artificial intelligence is changing this equation, bringing both new opportunities and new challenges.

10.                As a small country, Singapore has always had to find ways to overcome our constraints of size and manpower. Technology has helped us do more with less. We want to harness AI in the same way.

11.                In cybersecurity, we cannot simply assume that we can keep adding more analysts as the volume and sophistication of threats grow. We need our cyber defenders to see more, understand faster and to act more effectively. AI can help us do that.

12.                But our adversaries can harness AI too, to operate at greater speed and scale. So our challenge is to harness AI to strengthen our defences, rather than to allow it to tilt the advantage towards attackers.

13.                There is another dimension to this challenge. AI itself is becoming part of the digital environment that we need to secure. As AI agents gain access to data, applications and tools, they create new dependencies and vulnerabilities.

14.                For years, cybersecurity has required us to understand what is connected to what. In an increasingly agentic world, we must also understand what can act on what — with what permissions, and with what consequences.

Connecting Different Vantage Points

15.                Whether dealing with sophisticated cyber threats or the new challenges posed by AI, no single organisation has all the expertise or capabilities needed. Singapore has therefore focused on building the relationships and mechanisms that allow us to work together. For us, cooperation must go beyond agreeing on principles. It must translate into the ability to work together when it matters.

16.                We see this in ASEAN. Since 2006, the ASEAN CERT Incident Drill has brought national cyber response teams together to practise responding to cross-border incidents. These exercises build the relationships and habits of cooperation that matter in a real crisis.

17.                We are applying the same practical approach to AI at SICW this year. We want to move beyond discussing what AI might mean for cybersecurity, towards testing what it means in practice.

18.                CSA is partnering with Google to conduct an agentic AI cyber scenario exercise for international partners. We are also working with the Singapore AI Safety Hub on a frontier AI governance workshop for officials from ASEAN and the broader Asia-Pacific region. And with Cloudflare, we are conducting hands-on training in AI-enabled cyber defence for our critical infrastructure operators.

19.                These activities bring together different expertise to test our understanding of emerging risks and develop practical responses. They reflect our belief that some things can only be learnt by working through problems together.

Why SICW Matters

20.                SICW reflects this same approach. No single country or organisation has all the answers to the challenges facing cyberspace. But we can create a place where different perspectives, expertise and capabilities come together.

21.                This is especially important when geopolitical competition is making international cooperation more difficult. We may not agree on everything. But disagreement need not prevent dialogue, and competition need not preclude practical cooperation.

22.                So over the coming days, I hope we will use this opportunity not just to share what we know, but to learn from what others see and understand.

23.                As we begin SICW, I encourage each of us to look beyond our own vantage point — and find the people in this room who can help us see the rest.

24.                Thank you, and welcome to SICW 2026.