THE Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) said it will offer an academic program to help local universities develop more cybersecurity experts in the Philippines.
Allan Cabanlong, assistant secretary for cybersecurity and enabling technologies of the DICT, said they are open to partnership with any Philippine university interested to introduce the program in their educational services. He said the DICT first offered the curriculum to AMA University, which is currently fine-tuning it to their system and hopefully introduce it next school year.
“Basically, we gave the curriculum to AMA. The reference curriculum came from the George Marshall Center for European Security Studies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The center gave us the reference curriculum that can be used by local universities to craft their respective undergraduate and masteral programs in cybersecurity,” Cabanlong told the BusinessMirror in an interview on the sidelines of the Global Security Philippines 2018 conference held recently in Pasay City.
“The curriculum can be sourced for free as part of the advocacy of the DICT,” he added.
Cabanlong said the implementation of the cybersecurity curriculum will depend upon the Commission on Higher Education’s approval of AMA’s application.
He said the Asia Pacific College of the SM Group and Holy Angel University are interested to offer the cybersecurity program.
Cabanlong said the Philippines needs cybersecurity experts to handle the country’s cybersecurity matters in the digital economy. In the United States alone, 300,000 cybersecurity personnel are needed to manage Washington’s cyber-network infrastructure.
By producing a substantial pool of skilled cybersecurity people, Cabanlong said the Philippines can have a share of the global pie of the demand for this special field in ICT.
Meanwhile, the Philippines recently emerged as the ninth-most attacked country worldwide in terms of online threats, according to a report from cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab. With over 10 million Web infections detected last quarter, Kaspersky pointed out the country climbed eight notches in just three months. Data showed the country placed 17th on the list of nations most vulnerable to online dangers in the first quarter of this year.
From April to June 2018, Kaspersky Lab security products discovered an all-time high of 10,685,682 web-antivirus detections of different types from data provided by the computers of Kaspersky Security Network participants in the country.
The numbers for the second quarter show a 100-percent jump from January to March 2018 where 5,669,200 threats were detected. This is more than a threefold leap from April to June 2017 when 3,174,077 web-based malware infections were tracked. The country ranked 44th-most attacked country during this period.
Overall, 39.4 percent of the web-infection rate were detected from home users (those who use Kaspersky Internet Security) and 11.2 percent from business users (those who use Kaspersky Enterprise Security).