PLDT, Globe beef up cyber defenses

MANILA, Philippines —  Telco giants PLDT Inc. and Globe Telecom Inc. continue to bolster their investments to beef up their defenses as cyberattacks continue to evolve and increase.

PLDT first vice president and chief information security officer Angel Redoble, in a virtual briefing yesterday, said the company has already spent close to P3 billion for a three-year strategy implemented starting 2019.

“There is no figure on a year-on-year basis because our cybersecurity implementation is based on strategy, innovation, and of course the direction of the top management team. For every strategy, there is a corresponding budget,” Redoble said.

“But what is important here is the president and CEO and the top management team are very supportive of  the budget that we asked for that is based on strategy and based on year-on-year goals and objectives on what we are trying to achieve,” he said.

On the group’s predictive capability, Redoble said PLDT and Smart have been able to acquire new cyber threat information reaching 1.5 million this year, bringing the total number of cyber threat intelligence information acquired to more than 200 million.

“Predictive capability means that we are able to identify the possible threats or attacks that can be launched against us long before they arrive in our environment,” he said.

Redoble said the group has also been able to block this year eight billion attempts to access phishing and scamming sites.

“On a daily basis this is growing as our threat intelligence operation is constantly identifying and hunting these types of websites wherein our subscribers are prone to becoming victims up to the point of stealing their money or losing money. That’s eight billion access only for this year that we have prevented,” he said.

The group has also recorded close to 300 million combined cyberattacks, all of which have been detected and prevented, according to Redoble.

“On the responsive capacity wherein this is where we anchor our quick incident response capabilities, we have responded to more than 10 million validated attempts of attacks that were launched against us that warrant an investigation,” he said.

Globe, for its part, has invested $70 million for security and privacy capital expenditures since 2015.

“The annual cybersecurity investment is around $10 million since 2015. Depending on the type of cyberattacks or threat landscape, we just prioritize the initiatives and spendings,” said William Ignacio, Globe head of ISDP delivery and strategy division.

Despite these continuous investments, however, Globe chief information security officer Anton Bonifacio said security threats would always be there.

“It’s always a race between the defenders and the attackers. There will be times that we may stay ahead of the curb, they’re going to come up with new innovative things and then we got to be able to catch up. So it’s going to be a cat and mouse situation, ‘’   Bonifacio said.

“At the end of the day, we will continue to always try to do what we can on our end. I can honestly tell you that Globe has been fantastic in ensuring that we are able to put in the necessary investments to be able to protect our infrastructure. But we know for a fact that it’s a two-pronged game,” he said.

As part of its anti-spam and anti-scam campaign through a dedicated cybersecurity team, Globe has deactivated 5,670 confirmed spam numbers, and successfully blocked one billion spam messages so far this year.