AFP fending off cyber attacks — Brawner

Hackers have been regularly trying to attack the Armed Forces of the Philippines' cyber system and networks, but they have not succeeded so far.

This was confirmed by AFP chief General Romeo Brawner during an interview in a news forum organized by the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines.

"We experience this almost every day. They are trying to infiltrate our networks, but we're happy to note that so far, these are not successful," he said.

"We believe that some of the attacks are foreign, and some of them are local," he added.

Recently, several government agencies have been targeted in a spate of cyber attacks, including the Philippine Health Insurance Corp., the Philippine Statistics Authority, the Department of Science and Technology, and the House of Representatives.

Brawner said the AFP has already investigated the reported cyber attack in 2021, which caused the leakage of military data on the dark web.

He, however, assured the public there was no reason to be alarmed since the information leaked was only "routinary and old documents."

"We had hacking before, I think about two years ago, and some of the files—not really the sensitive files—are still circulating on the dark web. We investigated them right away, and we found out that these are old files," the AFP chief emphasized.

Loopholes

Brawner said the military organization has so far warded off attacks due to the establishment of cyber defense mechanisms.

"We're hoping that we could sustain that; The hackers are always looking for loopholes," he added.

Brawner said the AFP targets establishing a Cyber Security Command, an improvement to the military's current Cyber Security Group.

"With the increased threats that we are facing and the importance of the cyber domain as a new domain in warfare, we thought of coming up with these changes, like the development of the Cyber Command," he said.

Brawner said the plan still needs a thorough study and the approval of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., as some changes in the AFP organization are expected upon the establishment of the new service command.