Philippines fifth on cyber-attack list

by Denise A. Valdez, BusinessWorld, Aug 5, 2019

THE Philippines moved up to fifth place from ninth a year earlier in Kaspersky Lab’s global list of countries with most online threats detected in the second quarter of 2019.

The Russian cybersecurity firm said in a statement Monday that its Global Q2 2019 Security Bulletin, which compiles data from the Kaspersky Security Network (KSN), found that almost 7 million or 37.4% of Kaspersky users in the Philippines were attacked by online threats during the period.

The most-attacked countries are Algeria (44.1%), Nepal (43%), Albania (40.1%) and Djibouti (37.9%).

“Data from Kaspersky revealed that its users in the Philippines were still being attacked by cybercriminals through the popular attack method called drive-by download,” it said.

The drive-by download attack works by accessing an infected website.

“We can still point at the general carelessness and lack of online security awareness among our Filipino Internet users,” Kaspersky General Manager for Southeast Asia Yeo Siang Tiong said in the statement.

“[I]t is a known fact that when one buys a new smartphone, he or she will buy a protective case or some accessories, but not an internet security solution,” he added.

He noted there are more young users on social media this year, including those belonging to the 18-34 age bracket, which accounts for 63% of users online, from 41.7% a year earlier.

The report also said there have been more cyberthreat attacks coming from the Philippines in the second quarter, rising to about 67,000, up 15% from the same period last year.

Alongside the statistics on attacks, Kaspersky said it was able to detect and block about 13 million cyber attacks in the April to June period.

“The targeted Kaspersky users are about 9% of the total Internet users in the Philippines today which, from a cybersecurity point of view, is a big number and is worth paying attention to,” Mr. Yeo said.

“[W]ith recent data that says each Internet user now owns an average of 10 social media accounts, we need to be resolute in our push to have every person using the Internet to learn how to actively safeguard his or her data,” he added. —