DepEd checking data breach after hacking

MANILA, Philippines —  The Department of Education (DepEd) is examining its systems for possible data breaches after reports of hackers allegedly harvesting 750 gigabytes of data containing sensitive information on banking details, students, teachers and more.

DeepWeb Konek, a collective of cybersecurity practitioners, reported yesterday morning on X that it monitored a post by a “threat actor” in the dark web that it collected the data from a certain office of DepEd.

In the post shared by the group, the alleged threat actor said it would not be leaking any of the data to the public “yet” but might offer curated data in the future.

In a statement, DepEd said it was verifying whether any of its systems were hacked.

“We have instructed the field offices to run diagnostics and verify if there was indeed a hack. No report as of the moment as verification is ongoing,” DepEd said.

“We will provide information as soon as we get them from our Regional and Division Information Officers,” it added, stressing it was coordinating with the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT).

Renato Paraiso, DICT spokesman and assistant secretary for legal affairs, said the agency has isolated their investigation to a regional office of the DepEd.

The Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center is also looking into the reported DepEd breach.

In the past few days, the government suffered bomb threats delivered to the email of government offices.

The Department of Justice and other law enforcers have since launched operations to track the perpetrators.

Aside from the problem of “love” scam and other online scams, netizens around the world who engage in online dating are also grappling with the danger of cyberstalkers, a global survey found.

The online survey, conducted by United Kingdom-based international market research firm Arlington Research and commissioned by multinational cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, found that nearly a quarter of 21,000 respondents in 21 countries, or 23 percent, had experienced some form of online stalking from a person they were newly dating.

It was noted that the types of abuse are varied with well over a third or 39 percent of