Marcos gov’t urged to beef up local cybersecurity workforce

The Marcos administration has been urged to ramp up initiatives supporting the development of the local cybersecurity workforce given the increasing need for digital protection alongside the greater use of digital platforms.

AJ Dumanhug, CEO of cybersecurity firm Secuna, told the Inquirer that the government could tie up with more companies with the required expertise in developing related programs.

“As for the government, it should be supporting interagency cyber workforce initiatives by partnering with public and private stakeholders and building resources that are shared across at the national level,” he said.

“They could tap into leading cybersecurity firms and build a platform where they could share best practices and lessons learned with local and international partners seeking to leverage on the national cybersecurity policies,” he added.

The need to develop the local talent pool is deemed crucial given the workforce shortage and skills gap in the country, Dumanhug pointed out.

He explained that the young talents tend to choose working for big tech firms a few years after they acquire training from their jobs in the government.

“Better collaboration between the tech companies and the government is very much needed. Interest the young about taking cybersecurity skills program and encourage the existing ones to provide service to the country and outside the country, but from here,” the Secuna official said.

Dumanhug also raised the need to beef up the cybersecurity workforce amid the growing cyber threats during the pandemic.

Last year, Kaspersky blocked over 1.3 million phishing emails in the Philippines, which was about 11 percent of more than 11 million phishing emails detected in Southeast Asia.

Kaspersky observed that remote working amid the pandemic gave digital scammers more opportunities to mount their phishing attacks, noting business e-mail compromise (BEC) as one of the “rising trends.”

A BEC attack, Kaspersky explained, refers to a fraudulent activity whereby cyberhackers pretend to be an official representative of a business. They gain the victim’s trust to convince them to provide personal and even company information. INQ