The Philippine Statistics Authority on Thursday revealed that the breach of its database had exposed the financial information of people from poor communities being tracked by its Community-Based Monitoring System, or CBMS.

PSA data protection officer Atty. Eliezer Ambatali, in a television

interview, however, said the CBMS holds confidential demographic data that is "not extensive."

The PSA admitted the data breach this week after an alleged hacker claimed on social media that the agency's system had been compromised.

The state-run statistics bureau said the data breach had a limited impact, primarily affecting a specific section of its database, specifically the CBMS.

"We are confident that this attack will not affect the (Philippine Identification System or PhilSys), the National ID and the civil registration databases. These databases and all other databases that (are) connected to the services of the PSA (are) not connected to PhilSys and the civil registration services," he said.

"In fact, we have already monitored even the non-affected (sectors), we have scanned them for malicious activities, and we are employing right now additional security measures on all our systems," he added.

Asked about the perpetrators' motive for the cyber attack on the PSA, Ambatali said the intention seems to be to showcase or boast about their capability to carry out such cyberattacks.

Ambatali assured the public that data stored in the National Identification System and the PSA's civil registry services remained unaffected by the purported hacking.

The CBMS is a local-level data collection system that identifies households for the planning, budgeting, and execution of government initiatives. These initiatives encompass poverty reduction and economic development programs, including the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program or 4Ps.

The data breach at PSA occurred after a ransomware attack on the Philippine Health Insurance Corp., or PhilHealth.

As of Thursday morning, the CBMS webpage on the PSA website remained unavailable.

Ambatali said there were demographic, financial, and educational information on the CBMS.

"For the CBMS, it's not as extensive, the financial information, that's not extensive as the other surveys of the PSA. We collect non-income related characteristics relating to [the] financial status of our respondents," he added.