MANILA, Philippines--Government websites in the Philippines are vulnerable to computer attacks and without a nationwide cybersecurity program, government cannot keep hackers at bay, an official of the National Computer Center (NCC), an agency under the Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT), said Monday.
Angelo Timoteo Diaz de Rivera, NCC director general and e-Government Development Group commissioner, said that the CICT has already won government approval to create a P20-million pilot program for cybersecurity but has not received any budget.
"Right now we are, admittedly, vulnerable," Diaz de Rivera said when asked to describe the current security situation of government websites.
The Philippine Daily Inquirer has reported that Canadian researchers found that computer network of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) were among those infiltrated by hackers allegedly based in China.
The Information Warfare Monitor (IWM), composed of researchers from Ottawa-based think tank SecDev Group and University of Toronto's Munk Center for International Studies, said that it detected compromised computer systems in the government and private organizations of about 103 countries.
Diaz de Rivera said that the CICT-NCC is in touch with the DFA to determine the extent of the alleged infiltration.
"We are looking into it," Diaz de Rivera said.
He added that he hopes the CICT-NCC can start the cybersecurity program soon and create partnerships between public and private organizations.
"It (program) starts with awareness campaigns especially among employees who may still be accessing suspicious Internet sites through their office computers. The danger there is that if their office computer becomes enslaved by a malicious network, it could be used to get sensitive information and even bring down entire systems,? he said.
?Our proposed program, meanwhile, has a component that initiates partnerships between CICT, the police, and the private sector to proactively defend our systems," Diaz de Rivera added.
