THE Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) warned Tuesday of potential cyber-attacks against hospitals and health care facilities.
The DICT said there have been reports of such attacks targeting hospitals globally as they deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
“According to Healthcare IT News UK, a cyber-attack on a Czech hospital, also serving as a COVID-19 test facility, forced a tech shutdown in the midst of the outbreak, compromising life-sustaining medical equipment,” the DICT said.
It said Philippine hospitals and health care facilities should “employ emergency backup systems to ensure operational continuity for both databases and infrastructure in case of outages caused by malware or cyber-attacks.”
The department also warned the public against the so-called phishing attacks.
“Since March 18, 2020, a post entitled ‘P20,000 Para sa Lahat ng SSS Pangtawid’ has been circulating on Facebook. Clicking it directs the user to RANDOMNAMES.CLUB, which is a phishing site, and proceeds to repost the same link on the user’s Facebook wall,” it said.
It said the public should be wary of similar phishing threats, and they should only refer to official government websites and sources for information they need.
Cyber incidents can be reported directly to the DICT through its official Facebook page (www.facebook.com/Ncertgovph) or e-mail (cert-ph@dict.gov.ph). — Arjay L. Balinbin
