You may have seen the news a few days ago where hackers stole personal data of around 1.5 million people in Singapore. This number is about a quarter of the population.
The hackers attacked the government health database and stole the details of names, addresses and in some cases the medicine dispensed.
According to reports, a single computer was infected with malware and then the hackers used it to gain access to the database.
I'm sure this attack will have made Australian officials take notice. Indeed, Australia isn't the only country with integral personal information stored on a system. Taxation departments, births, deaths & marriage departments and so on all require exceptional security.
There is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) on the ASX called Betashares Global Cybersecurity ETF (ASX: HACK). It aims to give investors exposure to the leading companies in the global cybersecurity sector.
Within its holdings it has some names you might recognise. Its top ten holdings are: VMware, Cisco Systems, Symantec, Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, Qualys, VeriSign, Itron, CyberArk Software and Juniper.
The ETF is quite US-centric with 77.4% of it allocated there, but there are also holdings based in the UK, Israel, Japan and South Korea.
Although the hack only occurred in Singapore and only affected 1.5 million it would be easy to suggest that many organisations will now think about boosting their cyber defence capabilities. This could boost several of the businesses in this ETF.
Foolish takeaway
Over the past year the ETF has gone up by 26.88%, which is a very strong performance for an ETF. I wouldn't expect that every year but I imagine this group of companies will grow faster than the overall index in the medium-term due to the underlying demand.
