The DOST confirmed on April 3 that they had been affected by a massive hacking incident, where around 2TB worth of data was affected. DICT spokesperson Aboy Paraiso told ABS-CBN News that they are working with DOST to recover the lost data.
The massive amount of data that was affected by the hacking incident is the biggest to date. This pales in comparison to the Philhealth hacking incident last October, where around 600GB was hacked and around 20 million Philhealth members were affected.
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While it is not clear what data was affected, there are concerns that research information–along with the personal information of DOST employees and scientists–might be compromised due to the cyberattack.
Cyber advocate group Deep Web Konek claimed that the DOST hacking incident might be larger than expected and that the amount of data affected might be as large as 25TB.
According to its report, Deep Web Konek claims that a threat actor named “ph1ns” gained access to DOST’s critical network components like NAS devices and routers and even defaced the site by leaving a message against political dynasties and Charter Change. The said threat actor also used #opEDSA as part of its operations. The hashtag rings a bell, as it was also used on a data breach incident in Acer Philippines’ database.Â
Data Ethics Founder and Director Dominic Ligot thinks that the threat actor might be a “hacktivist” and speculates that the cyberattack could have been done by Filipinos.
