PH faces increasing app-driven hacks

The attack surface created by app-driven transformation is expanding rapidly, with 72 percent of the total number of attacks focused on user identities and applications, the gateway to personal data. This was one of the key topics discussed during the recently concluded 2017 National Information Communications Technology (NICT) Summit.

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This year’s theme, “Revving Up Information Infrastructures for Development,” highlights the vital role of telecommunication and information systems, also known as infostructures, in the 10-point Philippine Socioeconomic Agenda of President Rodrigo Duterte. The annual conference, which brings together more than 300 participants from the government, education sector and various industries, aims to help stakeholders understand the value of leveraging technology to improve public service delivery and ensure transparency and accountability within government.

Leading application delivery and application security solutions provider F5 Networks, represented by its Country Manager Oscar Visaya, participated in the summit and underscored its thrust of building a more secure IT landscape to help support the connectivity improvement and aggressive infrastructure expansion plans of the president.

Visaya, one of the event’s key resource speakers, shared his insights about transformations in the Philippine ICT landscape and the security required to thrive in an app-driven digital economy. He emphasized the need for a paradigm shift in how businesses and enterprises look at cybersecurity. According to him, security budgets today emphasize in less-grave risks such as protecting the network, which accounts for 90 percent of budget, with only 10 percent allocated for the most serious and common risks today which are user identities and applications.

“We cannot focus on the historical approach of incrementing forward as the application landscape is already changing the world one industry at a time. The growing number of applications, where most user data are stored, has tremendously increased the surface area of attack vectors and more apps directly mean that there are more opportunities and choices for attackers. Given this, a larger portion of IT budgets should be allocated for the re-orientation of security around the applications,” Visaya shared. He further explained how and why existing approaches fail, stating that insufficient visibility and application awareness post serious security risks.

The NICT 2017 summit was organized by the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), Chief Information Officers Forum Inc. (CIOF) and CIOF Foundation.