The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) has advised health-care facilities to report incidents of attacks in their ICT systems, as any threat may compromise their operations and risk lives in the process.
In a statement, the agency said the cyber-security breach on a hospital in Czech Republic may be replicated in the Philippines, hence local health-care facilities should be on the lookout for such attacks. Sadly, this comes amid the global Covid-19 pandemic.
The ransomware attack, the department said, forced the hospital to “a tech shutdown in the midst of the outbreak, compromising life-sustaining medical equipment.”
“To prevent similar incidents, the Cybersecurity Bureau of the DICT urges hospitals and healthcare facilities nationwide to employ emergency backup systems to ensure operational continuity for both databases and infrastructure in case of outages caused by malware or cyber attacks,” the advisory read.
Health-care facilities may report incidents through the ICT department’s communication channels, including social media.