PSA data breach probed

THE Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) said Friday that it is investigating the data breach incident at the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA).

Renato Paraiso, spokesman for DICT, said the agency's Cybersecurity Bureau's National Computer Emergency Response Team (NCERT) collected relevant logs from the PSA, and the data will be submitted for thorough analysis.

Also, the department is conducting its investigation to determine the extent of the data breach and if there are pieces of personal identifiable information that may have been compromised.

PSA's initial assessment, Paraiso said, is supposedly confined only to the Community-Based Monitoring System.

«The DICT confirms that the incident at PSA was not a ransomware attack, and that it is pursuing pertinent actions to apprehend the threat actor responsible for the data leak,» Paraiso said.

«As the DICT conducts its investigation on the logs obtained from PSA, the department urges the public to refrain from sharing posts that contain links to the alleged PSA data samples,» he added.

Further, Paraiso said that the public is being warned against clicking on those links as doing so could introduce malware to their devices, and those found guilty of sharing leaked data may face penalties under the Data Privacy Act of 2012.

«Further, we urge the public to implement cyber hygiene practices and remain vigilant against phishing and scam attempts,» he said.

«We would like to stress that individual government agencies still bear the principal responsibility of ensuring the protection and security of their computer systems, infrastructure, and sensitive data entrusted to them by the public,» he added.

NPC doing own probe

The National Privacy Commission (NPC), an agency attached to the DICT for policy coordination, is also planning to do its own probe into the breach in the PSA servers.

Speaking on Friday during the program «Bagong Pilipinas Ngayon,» NPC complaints and investigation division chief Michael Santos said the PSA had filed a personal data breach notification to the NPC.

«We are confirming that they filed a personal data breach notification,» Santos said in a mix of Filipino and English.

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