THE DEPARTMENT of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) said on Tuesday that it receives 25,000 cyber incidents monthly and employs artificial intelligence (AI) to deter most of them.
“We get 25,000 incidents every month. A huge percentage of this incident gets priority that gets validated by AI, leaving only a few, needs to be validated manually,” DWSD Assistant Secretary and Chief Information Officer Julius B. Gorospe said during a Palo Alto Networks media briefing. Only an average of 20% of said cyber incidents are validated by a human, he said.
Mr. Gorospe said cyber incidents refer to attempts to hack the system or a software running that tries to steal passwords but excludes social media account hacking.
Mr. Gorospe said this is in response to the rising number of incidents when there’s only a “handful” of cyber team members in the DSWD department.
Last year, the DSWD National Capital Region office’s account was hacked and posted a fake announcement of the distribution of cash aid under the DSWD’s Sustainable Livelihood Program (SLP). This led to parents and students flocking to the DSWD NCR office. “Unfortunately, Facebook is outside of our system. Dealing with social media companies Facebook, and Twitter, sounds difficult because they have their own policies to take down a post for example,” he said when asked about the mentioned attacks.
In response, DSWD has its own security operations center (SOC) which directs to DSWD Secretary Rex T. Gatchalian.
“We are building a team at a SOC team in-house. We don’t want to outsource it, we would like to develop our own talents eventually,” said Mr. Gorospe, also noting that the department has technology partners such as Palo Alton Networks that supply educational assistance to address the skills and cybersecurity personnel gap.
According to Palo Alto Networks Regional Vice President for ASEAN Steven Scheurmann, AI is important to win the fight against cybercriminals.
“We want to secure AI by design, we’re embedding precision AI in our portfolio. We want to simplify that cybersecurity is important in a country like the Philippines,” Mr. Scheurmann added.
He is referring to Palo Alto Networks’ Precision AI™, which incorporates machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) with generative AI (GenAI) for real-time applications, to defend against AI-supported threat tactics.
According to the cybersecurity firm, it partners with DSWD using its Incident Response (IR) services, and AI-driven solutions like Cortex XSIAM and Cortex XDR to combat threats. — Aubrey Rose A. Inosante
