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Philippines steps up defences against Chinese hackers after ‘cyberwar’ warning from telecoms security chief
- Social media accounts of the Philippine coastguard, the government’s IT agency and President Marcos Jnr’s own website have all been hit this year
- Chinese officials denied any involvement, as authorities in Manila said earlier that they’d ‘pinpointed’ some of the attacks to servers based in China
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Following a recent spate of cyberattacks blamed on Chinese hackers, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr has unveiled a six-year plan to step up cybersecurity and counter the risks posed by digital intrusions from abroad.
The plan, announced on Sunday, stresses the “need for operational guidelines” and the urgent need for existing mechanisms to be enhanced to deter cyberattacks.
It comes after the official Facebook account of the Philippines’ coastguard was hacked on March 29. An “unidentified entity” posted several “malicious” short videos to the account before the government regained control of it six days later, according to coastguard spokesman Rear Admiral Armand Balilo.
It was the second time the coastguard’s Facebook account had been hit this year. Hackers also gained control of the account in February, less than two weeks after the coastguard’s official account on X, formerly Twitter, was also hacked.
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Marcos Jnr’s own website, the email server of the Philippine Department of Information and Communications Technology and the website of National Coast Watch Centre were also all targeted by hackers in January, according to The Philippine Star newspaper.
“We are not attributing this to any state. But using the internet protocol addresses, we pinpointed it to China,” Renato Paraiso, spokesman for the Department of Information and Communications Technology, said in February.
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He said investigators had traced the hackers and suspected they were using the services of Chinese state-owned telecoms company China Unicom.
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China denies accusations of state-sponsored hacking from US, UK and New Zealand
China denies accusations of state-sponsored hacking from US, UK and New Zealand
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