Hontiveros wants Senate probe into ‘troubling’ series of hackings, data breaches in gov’t websites

A resolution has been filed in the Senate to investigate the "troubling series of hacking and data breach incidents" that were experienced by various government agencies.

In Proposed Senate Resolution No. 829, Senator Risa Hontiveros called on the Senate to assess the adequacy of the government's current cybersecurity measures and preparedness for malicious cyberattacks.

"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," Hontiveros said in the resolution which she filed on Monday.

The resolution cited the recent cyberattacks on the state-run Philippine Health Insurance Corporation and the Philippine Statistics Authority.

She also mentioned in her resolution the defacing of the House of Representatives website over the weekend.

PhilHealth announced on 22 September the temporary shutdown of its website as well as its membership portal to contain an "information security incident."

Days later, the Medusa ransomware group demanded $300,000 or around P17,000,000 from the agency in exchange for control of its system as well as the data it illegally obtained from the affected workstations.

PhilHealth ignored the self-imposed deadline of the computer hackers, leading to the actual publication of the stolen data on the dark web.

The leaked data includes details on employees' identification cards, memorandums, directives and hospital bills.

Last week, PhilHealth Corporate Affairs Group Acting Vice President Rey Baleña admitted that the exact number of members whose personal data was compromised is still unknown.

Baleña said the state-run health insurer is still awaiting the report of the Department of Information and Communications Technology, which previously said that stolen data uploaded on the dark web by the hackers amounted to about 734 gigabytes uncompressed.

'Stop hacking spree'

Senator Grace Poe, chair of the Senate Committee on Public Services, also echoed the sentiments of her fellow senator against what she described as a "hacking spree of government websites."

"The DICT and concerned agencies must put a halt to what is turning out to be a hacking spree of government websites," Poe said in a separate statement.

"At stake are not only important government records, but sensitive data that could compromise the country's security," she added.

She warned that data breaches "jeopardize the personal information of the people, whose own accounts may be subjected to hacking or unwanted exposures."

"The government must invest in strong cyber security infrastructures to safeguard public records," she said.

"It should not be business as usual and just wait for the next victim of data breach. The hacking should stop and those responsible should be held accountable," she added.