Cyberattacks in PH down 20% in 2023

MANILA, Philippines — The increasingly digital Philippines saw 76 million cyberattacks last year, including cyber espionage and circumvention of Windows operating systems, according to a report by cybersecurity company Trend Micro, raising the need to intensify risk management.

While this figure showed a 20-percent decline from 2022, Trend Micro said the cyber incident detections were still considered high—and sophisticated.

The cybersecurity firm noted that among them were advanced persistent threats, a type of cyberattack that seeks to obtain unauthorized access to a computer network and tends to avoid detection for an extended period.

READ: PH cyberdefenses building up; attacks down in 2023

Trend Micro identified adversary groups Earth Estries and Mustang Panda as primary bad actors targeting local organizations in the past year.

Earth Estries, it explained, is popular for rolling out “cyberespionage campaigns and [using] multiple backdoors and hacking tools.”

READ: Phishing, ransomware attacks remain top cyber threats in PH

The other group, meanwhile, launches seemingly legitimate software that targets Windows operating systems and steals information.

Other usual digital threats last year, as detected by Trend Micro, included email threats and malware.

An example of an email threat is business email compromise, whereby hackers send emails embedded with suspicious links to business emails of company employees. Such a threat hopes to trick employees into providing access to the corporate IT system.

Malware, short for malicious software, is designed to illegally obtain access to a computer system.

Globally, Trend Micro noted that cyber threats had risen by 10 percent to 160 billion last year. INQ