Bong les bill seeking probe on alleged gov’t data breach
SENATOR Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr. filed Senate Resolution 573 which seeks to investigate the reported data breach in the databases of the Philippine National Police (PNP) and other government agencies.
“Without reliable and trustworthy cybersecurity measures in place, these reported data breaches remain to have the dangerous potential of exposing individuals to identity theft, phishing attacks, and a range of other malicious activities, which will ultimately victimize the public,” Revilla said.
He added that government agencies as well as private entities may very well be endangered by the susceptibilities of our cybersecurity if left inadequate.
The senator also said data breaches in government records may lead to potential national security issues.
If unabated, the exposed data may lead to nefarious transactions such as criminals taking advantage of the leaked data to blackmail and threaten law enforcers, Revilla said.
To support his proposal, Revilla cited VPNMentor, a cybersecurity research company, which reported that a staggering 1,279,437 records belonging to law enforcement agencies.
This included sensitive police employee information, which has been compromised in an unprecedented data breach. The report was authored by cybersecurity researcher Jeremiah Fowler.
Revilla further said the data hacking reportedly exposed 817.54 gigabytes of both applicant and employee records under multiple state agencies, including the PNP, NBI, BIR and Special Action Force (SAF).
“The possibly compromised records include highly sensitive data such as fingerprint scans, birth certificates, tax identification numbers (TIN), tax filing records, academic transcripts, and even passport copies,” said Revilla said.
He said the report even revealed that the said data were available for public access for at least six weeks
“The same report highlighted that these documents were stored in an unsecured, non-password-protected database, which is easily accessible to individuals with an internet connection and highly vulnerable to cyberattacks,” Revilla said.