‘We are safe’: DICT assures public cybersafety after recent hacking attempts

The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) assured the public on Monday, Feb. 5, that the country is safe following the successful thwarting of two cyberattacks in recent days.

“In general, of course we’re safe,” DICT Undersecretary for Infostructure Management, Cybersecurity and Upskilling Jeffrey Ian C. Dy said in a DZBB interview.

“I can assure the public that based on our discussions and meetings with other agencies concerned with cybersecurity, the security agencies are more resilient,” Dy added.

Meanwhile, he emphasized that hacking incidents are not limited to the Philippines but pose a threat all over the world.

“I just want to say that over the past few weeks, we have witnessed major hacking incidents not only in the Philippines but also in other parts of the world,” Dy said.

“For example, Microsoft was hacked, and similarly, the email of the government of the United States housed on Microsoft was targeted,” he added.

Moreover, despite tracing the IP address of the hackers to “China Unicom,” a state-owned telecommunication company in China, Dy reiterated that the DICT is not concluding that the Chinese government is behind these hacking incidents.

He also emphasized that from all the cyberattack attempts, only 10 percent of those are successful.

“What I can tell the public is that, of hundreds of thousands (cyberattack attempts on government services), you may notice that the successful ones, in our analysis, are around 10 percent or even less,” the DICT official said.

Hacker motives

Meanwhile, Dy explained the motives of hackers from the previous cyberattacks.

In an Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) hacking attempt, hackers aimed to shut down the system.

“For OWWA, their (hackers) target is to take down the website; they want it to go down, like a denial-of-service attack,” Dy said.

For Google Workspace hacking attempts, however, he noted that “their motivation is to gather information or accounts of the administration.”

Dy then commended the OWWA for its swift coordination with the DICT, the reason behind the thwarted hacking attempt.

“For OWWA, I will attribute that to the fast coordination of DICT and OWWA ICT officials, and of course, it seems that OWWA also invested in equipment that can detect and prevent hacking incidents,” he said.

— Sonny Daanoy