To cater the country’s demand to protect Critical Information Infrastructure (CII), the Philippines calls at least 180,000 cybersecurity and data privacy practitioners said by Sam Jacoba, the Founding President of National Association of Data Protection Officers of the Philippines (NADPOP).
Currently, the country has only more than two hundred identified practitioners whose half of them are working abroad.
Moreover, Jacoba also shared Ivan Uy of the Department of Information and Communication Technology’s statement that there will be more cases of hacking by 2024. Also, they have predicted the same vision to which people converted online mostly during the pandemic.
Recently, two key government institutions such as PhilHeath and Philippine Statistics Authority experienced hacking incidents drowning their cyber security and data privacy.
Philippine Health Insurance Corporation has been attacked by ransomware named Medusa with at least 13 million members’ information leaked online and who have demanded $300,000 for computer access and deleted data to be restored.
In connection, the Philippine Statistics Authority suffered a data breach. Information and Communications Technology (DICT) Secretary Ivan John Uy said that ransomware is not involved but only a data breach.
Citing these cyber cases, Jacoba said in a table conversation that there has to be justice since there is the data already. “And call the government, if you collect something, protect it. Otherwise, do not collect it,” he said.
Jacoba also shared the 2016 “Comeleak” issue of Commission on Elections where 42 million data of voting Filipinos was compromised and sold on a dark web.
He then added that leadership prioritization also creates an impact to the situation, “It’s the leader that defines it.”
The Global Data Breach statistics revealed in October that since 2004 the Philippines recorded 124 million accounts that have been breached, leading the country to rank 5th in Asia for the most number of data breaches. Moreover, another security company Kaspersky reported the Philippines as 5th in Southeast Asia with the most phishing attacks in 2022 with 4,559,288 incidents. By Adrian Mas
