With more businesses going digital in the pandemic, PLDT urges the implementation of extensive cybersecurity measures to prevent, combat, and mitigate cyber threats and attacks. The digital community has seen a spike in cyber threat activities, beginning March 2020, when lockdowns were implemented.

Through its business units PLDT Enterprise and ePLDT, PLDT advises organizations with critical and sensitive data to be wary of cybercriminals.

In a data report, the PLDT group blocked over 71 billion access to malicious websites as of end-2020. This helped in curbing phishing and digital scamming campaigns which preyed on unsuspecting victims by using COVID-19 themed malicious techniques.

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In 2020, around 675,000 incidents were detected by the PLDT Group’s Security Operations Center, averaging over 56,000 incidents each month, four times more compared to pre-pandemic figures.

PLDT urges organizations to plan and implement cybersecurity measures to counter these kinds of incidents. Preparation includes having the end-to-end capabilities before, during, and after an attack.

Cyber hygiene recommendations

The cybersecurity approach ePLDT recommends can be summed up to the following: Frameworks, Intelligence, Technology and Tools, and Expertise, or FITE.

“At PLDT, we have partner technologies to deliver this capability,” said Bernice Pineda, business development manager for Cybersecurity, ePLDT. “But we need to equally strengthen the company’s predictive, detection and response capabilities. It is paramount for companies to assess their risk exposures and deploy intelligent predictive technologies to foresee attacks.”

The question that needs to be answered is, “What happens when an attack does get through?” asked Pineda. The mindset that companies need to have is that a cybersecurity breach is no longer a question of “If” but “When.” This is where having an incident response plan comes into play. Organizations need to be able to quickly respond to, contain, and investigate attacks, as well as immediately remediate exploited vulnerabilities.”