Philippines Among Most Vulnerable to Retail Systems Hacking

THE PHILIPPINES ranked among the countries in the region most vulnerable to hackers who target electronic retail systems, cyber security company Trend Micro’s Philippine unit said on Wednesday in a media briefing.

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Point-of-sale (POS) system malware incidents, affecting purchases made through a credit card or a debit card, are among the most prevalent cyber crimes in the Philippines.

In the Asia-Pacific, the Philippines had the fifth highest rate of POS attacks at 6% while the United States topped the list at 31%. Countries in second to fourth place were Australia (10%), Taiwan (9%), and Brazil (8%).

The study covers the first half of 2015.

POS systems are becoming increasingly available to even small to medium enterprises due to the influx of card-swiping devices employing cheap hardware, it sad.

“It’s not just the cards, but the system server where the data is stored or the gadget being used to swipe the card is also vulnerable,” said Myla V. Pilao, Trend Micro Philippines’ Director of Marketing Communications said.

Meanwhile, online banking was also an area of concern, as the Philippines had the fourth highest number of attacks in the region. There were over one million malware detections in the Philippines for the third quarter alone, Trend Micro said.

As Filipinos become more accustomed to make their purchases through e-commerce, Trend Micro noted that local banks still do not use the most modern security practices for their credit and debit cards.

Financial institutions in the Philippines still do not employ EMV cards that come with embedded chips as an added security feature to the personal identification number.

“Anything that is connected to the Internet, we have to assume that it is a target,” said Ms. Pilao.

“It would take us years to put up regulation (against cybersecurity threats), that is the biggest hurdle. We also need capacity building. Our law enforcement, they are used to investigating crimes on the street but to get them to investigate online won’t be easy because it’s not their habit,” she said.

The country’s e-commerce law, which Ms. Pilao pointed out, is outdated based on what is happening in real world attacks. -- Nicolo Paolo A. Pascual