Marcos to DICT: Beef up defenses vs. cybercriminals

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has ordered the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) to beef up its defense against cybercriminals, as he expressed concern over recent data leaks in government agencies.

“Yesterday, the President called up and he’s really very afraid of what’s happening here. And he actually told us that we should really beef up our defenses,” DICT Undersecretary Jeffrey Ian Dy said in an interview with Dobol B TV.

Dy said Mr. Marcos wants to know the technical details of the data breach incidents in government agencies.

“[The President said] we shouldn’t be reacting after the fact, we should be preparing before it happens,” Dy said, adding that Mr. Marcos committed to help the agency to fight cybercriminals.

Meanwhile, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) said Friday that the perpetrators of the data breach on its Community-Based Monitoring System (CBMS) a week ago will soon be brought to justice.

In a statement, PSA said an investigation into the causes and scale of the incident is being conducted jointly with the DICT National Computer Emergency Response Team-Philippines (NCERT-PH), the Philippine National Police (PNP) Anti-Cybercrime Group, the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) Cybercrime Division, and the National Privacy Commission (NPC) Compliance and Monitoring Division.

“The PSA and aforementioned partners are working tirelessly to prevent the further disclosure of data. Leads for the identification of the bad actors have been provided to the PNP and the NBI for further action,” it said.

Besides the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth), Dy confirmed that the Philippine Statistics Office, the Department of Science and Technology, and the PNP were hacked.

According to Dy, there are some 10,000 experts’ data involved in the DOST hacking incident, while the PNP was an old issue.

In a separate statement, Renato Paraiso, spokesperson of DICT, said the NCERT collected relevant logs from the PSA for thorough analysis and is currently probing the extent of the data breach, and if personal identifiable information may have been compromised.

From the PSA’s initial assessment, Paraiso said the system