LOCAL banks are urged to toughen cyber security measures to protect clients from hackers out to target banking, financial services, and insurance sectors.
A unit of PLDT said the financial sector is gearing for an increase in cases and levels of aggressiveness of cybercrimes.
It noted that as one of the fastest growing economies in the Asia Pacific, the Philippines is perceived to be one of the next hotspots for cyber terrorism.
It advised banks to allocate resources to boost its cybersecurity infrastructure to ensure its clients of secured transactions.
“Cyberattacks are getting more and more sophisticated every day. The usual practice is to provide and implement reactive actions by depending on the technologies.
However, we would like to emphasize that it is always better to be proactive in anything that involves high stakes security,” said Angel Redoble, ePLDT Group’s chief information security officer, in a statement.
ePLDT is one of the investors in research and development for end-to-end cybersecurity solutions in the country. It offers a complete portfolio that allows customers to predict, prevent, detect and respond to attacks before, during and after they happen.
“Threats on cyberattacks have been evolving and becoming more advanced at an alarmingly rapid rate. In this day and age, it is critical for us to get our clients ready and accept that no company nor individual is 100 percent safe from any breach. This means that as business leaders, preparedness means being ready before, during, and after an attack,” said Nerisse Ramos, ePLDT Group’s senior vice president and chief operating officer.
The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has issued Circular 808 providing enhanced guidelines on technology risk management and Circular 982 covering enhanced guidelines on information security management.
It announced it may shorten the minimum reporting time for lenders to report cybersecurity breaches to 24 hours from as long as 10 days.
Data from the BSP show that as of December 2016, there were 28,392 branches of financial institutions in the country. (KOC)