Threat actors are just waiting for the right timing to attack and harvest precious data. This was the warning of Palo Alto country manager Oscar Visaya in an exclusive interview on the sidelines of the VST-ECS CXO Tech Summit on Friday in Mactan, Cebu.

"Threat actors nowadays are too good. They find the weakest link in the organizations. They find time and the right opportunity to enter to spread the virus," he said.

The cybersecurity expert said that with adversaries seeking to exploit vulnerabilities at every step of the application life cycle, it has become more crucial than ever for organizations to strengthen their security measures.

"Right now, generative artificial intelligence is used to send effective phishing emails. And with AI, cyber threats can evolve. That is the reason we are asking all organizations to go along with the evolution to protect organizations. Legacy technology should be changed to the latest and safest one. This will put organizations to be at par with others. Cybersecurity is all about mindset as all dealings in the future will be digitalized and your organization will be left behind, then the future is not good for you," said Visaya.

On Monday, Senator Risa Hontiveros filed Senate Resolution 829, seeking to find out why three government institutions were penetrated by hackers, which led to the leaking of individuals' personal information and raising doubts about the agency's capability to protect the data of citizens.

"The breach of personal and sensitive information kept by government agencies endangers the safety and security of all Filipinos — leaving us even more vulnerable to increasingly nefarious schemes involving text message spams, online scams, phishing, financial fraud, extortion, blackmail, and identity theft," the resolution read.

Last month, state insurer Philippine Health Insurance Corporation was reportedly attacked by Medusa Ransomware, compromising some members' personal and sensitive information such as addresses, and social security numbers, among others.

A separate cyberattack targeted the Philippine Statistics Authority, which announced on 12 October that personal and sensitive data from its Community-Based Monitoring System had been accessed by "bad actors."

Meanwhile, the website of the House of Representatives was also hacked last Sunday.

Palo Alto Networks, a leader in the cybersecurity domain with a presence in the Philippines, introduced the CI/CD Security module to its Prisma Cloud platform.

The CI/CD Security module is a groundbreaking addition to Prisma Cloud, as it offers seamless integration of software delivery pipeline security into organizations' cloud-native environments.

Attacks on software supply chains are on the rise due to the prevalence of open-source usage and the complexity of software dependency, which makes securing the software supply chain difficult.

In 2022, more than 7,300 malicious Open-Source Software packages were discovered across all major package manager registries. ra