(Eagle News)–China has reached out and asked for the Philippines’ cooperation following reports of cyber attacks on Philippine government email addresses and others.
Information and Communications Technology Secretary Ivan John Uy said China also asked if the Philippines could share information with them.
“We are open to working with everybody,” Uy said, adding that an investigation into the cyber attacks should be a mutual activity undertaken by both the Philippine government and China.
As to the motive of the hackers, he said “everything is in the realm of the possible.”
“..But we always maintain open arms. Anyone who wants to cooperate, you know, we don’t reject those offers and then see where we go from there,” he said.
“We take those things very seriously and we actually have built up more competencies in detecting early on, any of those attempts to hack into not just government systems, but also private corporations. There have been some private institutions that were also compromised by ransomware,” he added.
Earlier, Uy revealed there were attacks intended to take down the Overseas Workers and Welfare Administration website in the past few weeks.
Spyware or espionage activities, which he said may have been perpetrated by threat actors or advanced threat groups of a clandestine nature that were detected by Google’s tactical information security arm also targeted government email addresses particularly those of the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG), National Coast Watch (NCW) and the DICT.
He said some private domains, including President Bongbong Marcos’ site, were also subject to attacks.
He added they were all successfully thwarted.
Based on their investigation, he said the attacker’s “command and control” center was within China, specifically China Unicom.
