Reflecting on the pandemic and Philippine IT security

It isn’t difficult to recall how the pandemic shook our lives. The images we likely would conjure would be how we enclosed ourselves in our homes, decked ourselves with masks and face shields and constantly practiced quarantining.

What we may not remember as vividly is how hackers around the world adapted during this period. This was a time when attackers realized that people and businesses who never worked remotely in their lives before suddenly had to use strange and unfamiliar technologies – crypticacronyms such as “VPN,” “PAM” and “OTP.” Surely these hackers couldn’t resist taking advantage of the online equivalents of newborn lambs. And take advantage, they certainly did. Hackers only needed to find one employee using a weak password – such as “password” – to gain access to a company’s entire infrastructure. Even for small organizations of just about a hundred employees, having one such person using a simple password would be likely.

Having people work remotely during a pandemic would imply that the documents and materials they work with are stored digitally within their organization. The hacker, now with access inside that organization, would find these and render everything unusable by “encrypting” them – effectively halting business. The hacker would hold all this data hostage, only agreeing to let the company use it again if a ransom is paid. Hence the term “ransomware” was coined. Payment for this ransom is typically done through a Bitcoin transaction, which conveniently masks the hacker’s identity.

Motivated by the mouth-watering amount of cash from a ransomware payment, hackers have built extremely helpful “customer support” in their websites. Through this, they would guide their most valued victim, nay…“customer,” to make a successful payment. If the website was not located in the seedy underbelly of the internet – the “Dark Web” – one might believe this was a professional mainstream service.

These ransomware attacks characterized the earliest wave of attacks by hackers looking to monetize the pandemic. From a sample size of 5,600 organizations surveyed by Sophos, the Philippines ranked 15th in the world for percentage of local companies hit by