In just the first two quarters of 2024, Viettel Threat Intelligence Center, under Viettel Cyber Security, has released a report revealing several emerging cyber threats in the Philippines, affecting individuals and organizations, especially within the government sector.
315,000 compromised credentials, 17,456 phishing attacks, and numerous vulnerabilities are just some of the alarming statistics about the Philippines’ cybersecurity landscape in the first half of 2024 that organizations can not ignore.
Surprisingly, despite the alarming level of danger, many companies remain confident in their ability to stay resilient amidst this evolving cybersecurity landscape. This confidence highlights a gap, suggesting that companies may have misplaced trust in their ability to navigate the threat landscape and are not properly assessing the true scale of the challenges they face.
Data Breaches are increasing at an alarming rate, especially in the government and education sectors.
Viettel Threat Intelligence recorded over 315,000 compromised credentials in the Philippines in the first half of 2024. The rise of Stealer-as-a-service (SaaS) and Stealer Malware groups have contributed significantly to the increase of compromised credentials.
Numerous incidents involving the leak of privileged credentials for critical and sensitive systems, such as email systems, single sign-on (SSO) management systems, Active Directory (AD) systems, and internal access VPNs, have raised serious concerns. If this information falls into the wrong hands, it could be used for malicious purposes, such as disrupting operations, stealing sensitive data, or conducting cyberattacks.
In the first half of 2024 witnessed a surge in data breaches and selling on darkweb in the Philippines cyberspace.
The amount of data breaches has reached over 660 million records, more than 1TB of data and nearly 150GB of KYC data. These are alarming figures regarding the situation of data breaches in the Philippines.
The number of cases of data breaches and selling on dark web is showing an increasing trend, especially in March with 15 incidents:
The government sector has experienced the highest number of data breach incidents, accounting for 26.1% of the total, followed by the education sector with 17.4%. Retail and service businesses have also become targets of attack groups, accounting for a total of 10.9%.
Viettel Threat Intelligence also identified a scenario of attacking virtualized infrastructure, where the attacker gains access to the internal network, escalates privileges, takes control of the vCenter management system, encrypts the entire system, and demands ransom.
Despite ongoing efforts by the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) and various organizations to enhance cybersecurity awareness in the Philippines, many entities continue to struggle.
To effectively navigate this high-stakes, complex environment, organizations must stay ahead to ensure robust cybersecurity resilience.
