The Philippine electoral system is vulnerable to cyberattack and the government may not be prepared for it, an American cybersecurity expert has warned. Marc Goodman, founder of the Future Crimes Institute and chairman of policy, law and ethics at Silicon Valley’s Singularity University, said governments around the world, particularly the Philippines, were woefully unprepared for threats brought by the automation. The capability of the government to protect its cyber assets was placed in doubt after the “biggest data breach in history” in March 2016, when the database of voters was hacked by the Anonymous group more than a month before the May 2016 national elections.
“Here in the Philippines there has been hacking of the elections as well when in April 2016, the website of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) was taken over by the Philippine group of Anonymous to show how hackable the elections were,” he said during the PilipinasCon 2018, a forum on Cybersecurity and the Internet of Things, in Taguig late Wednesday.
Goodman noted that data of over 55 million voters, 200,000 emails, 2.3 million passport details, and 15.7 million fingerprints were leaked and became available in the dark web, a hidden part of the World Wide Web that cannot be easily accessed by normal sites.
Full Article: Elections vulnerable to hacking – US expert – The Manila Times Online.