Cyberattacks on PHL gov’t, firms reach over 3,000

SUCCESSFUL cyberattacks on the government and companies in the Philippines reached over 3,000 from 2020 to 2022, an official of the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) said.

“The monitored attacks are approximately 3,000, while the detected threats are around 54,000,” DICT Assistant Secretary for CyberSecurity and Upskilling Jeffrey Ian C. Dy told reporters on the sidelines of the HackforGov event on Wednesday.

Mr. Dy said 60% of the more than 3,000 high-level attacks detected by the Philippine National Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-PH) are attacks on the government.

“It is tagged as a threat when we find out that you are vulnerable and you need to do something about it —  for example, when your patches are not updated,” CERT-PH Chief George P. Tardio said. 

Data from global cybersecurity company Kaspersky showed the Philippines ranked second among countries most attacked by web threats worldwide in 2022.

This is two notches higher than its ranking in the previous year, when it recorded 50.54 million web attacks.

“Given the increased vulnerability of our nation’s digital landscape, it is crucial to protect the Philippines’ critical infrastructure by continuously improving our cyber preparedness and incident response capabilities,” DICT Undersecretary Paul Joseph V. Mercado said at the event.

Among its programs is the HackforGov event, a cybersecurity competition that aims to build capacity by providing students with hands-on experience in the various techniques used in the virtual world.

The DICT said there is a lack of cybersecurity professionals in the Philippines, as they estimate Certified Information Systems Security Professionals to be at just around 300 nationwide, majority of whom are in the private sector.

“It is a challenge. We are improving but not as quickly as we want, as fast as we want compared to other ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) neighbors,” Mr. Dy said.

“The figures vary. Some research says that we should have at least 200,000 cybersecurity professionals within the next month to two years,” he added. — Justine Irish D. Tabile