DICT sees more cyberattacks ahead of elections
An official of the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) is anticipating more cyberattacks in the weeks leading up to the midterm polls through inorganic social media engagements attributed to troll farms.
DICT Undersecretary Jeff Dy told reporters on Saturday that election-related posts could be “amplified” by bots—a term for an interweb robot that does repetitive tasks—and go viral. This, in effect, “hacks the algorithm” of social media users, he added.
Dy cited social media posts or memes that are boosted by unrelated hashtags that are trending, usually celebrities or political parties.
And he pointed out the loophole in this scenario: “The problem is it’s not illegal, so there’s nothing to do. So we just monitor.”
“There is no social media regulation, and there’s no law to cover that. You operate a troll farm, it’s not illegal,” he told the Inquirer on the sidelines of the news briefing.
Dy said the DICT, along with other government agencies, had already discussed the issue on troll farms and other types of cyberattacks with tech giants, but corrective actions were only temporary and case-specific.
“Eventually, they will just let [other similar cases] go,” he said.
Because of the lack of regulatory laws for such operations, the DICT could only “advise policies” that could be crafted in the future.
5.4M hacking tries
However, hacking into a website to gain illegal access and bar the intended users from using the system is already a criminal offense under Republic Act No. 10175, or the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012.
A total of 5.4 million malicious attempts to hack at least 32 government agencies were recorded in 2024, according to Dy. Of the processed cases, 60 were “advanced persistent threat,” a type of cyberattack with “state-level” technology or backing.
The biggest cyberattack problem in the country are “information stealers” or “keyboard loggers,” he noted. These hackers are able to spread malware where the username and password that a user enters on the internet.
Because of these cases, Dy urged the public to do away with just using passwords and opt for multifactor authentication, which includes biometric or facial recognition.
