DICT laments shrinking funding for cybersecurity

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) lamented its shrinking funds for cybersecurity amid the growing number of cyberattacks in the country particularly targeting government agencies, like the recent Medusa ransomware attack on the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth).

According to Jeffrey Ian Dy, Undersecretary for cybersecurity, connectivity and upskilling, the painstaking sweep DICT conducted to check the targeted employee workstations had taken a longer time to finish as the agency’s subscription for necessary forensic cybersecurity tools has not been renewed due to lack of budget.

“But budget for cybersecurity has been cut. And for next year, it was cut further. It was a huge cut, more than P300 million was cut for next year,” Dy said.

According to him, the declining funds allocated for cybersecurity is worrisome considering the increasing number of hacks being staged.

From their monitoring, Dy said that they have looked into about 3,000 cybersecurity incidents from January to August this year, a majority of which targeted government agencies.

“It’s not getting safer. The world is not getting safer,” Dy said. “We should walk the talk. We should invest in cybersecurity and that’s what we’re doing. Or that’s what we are trying to do if we will just be given the necessary funds to do it.”

Dy said that their investigation of the Medusa ransomware attack on PhilHealth has determined that the hackers had successfully breached more than 150 employee workstations but were not able to infiltrate the members’ database.