Manila: The Philippines is increasingly lagging far behind in online security to the detriment not only of the government and private firms, but also to individuals who increasingly use technology in their daily lives, a senior lawmaker has said.

“We are being overtaken by increasingly digital paradigms in information and communications,” Senator Edgardo Angara, who had been advocating increased security in the use of Internet reiterated. “A large chunk of human activity nowadays is no longer merely physical--it occurs in the internet,” he added.

Angara aired the warning as he urged his colleagues in the legislature to support the passage of two important measures that will ensure greater internet security for Filipinos following reports of massive cyber attacks including malware invasion, phising scams and sexual predation.

Last year, Angara filed two bills on cyber security namely, Senate Bill No. 2796 or the Cybercrime Prevention Act and Senate Bill No. 2965 or the Data Privacy Act.

The Cybercrime Prevention Act seeks to define the boundaries between permissible Internet activity and those that can be considered as criminal.

Earlier, Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) chief, Director Samuel Pagdilao Jr. said that from year 2003 to November 2011, the CIDG has recorded some 1,340 attacks in the form of website defacement against 81 government agencies. Even the Philippine National Police website was not spared from falling prey on the vicious hackers.

The CIDG has recorded a total of 340 incidents of website defacements on national government units and 1,038 incidents on local government agencies in the past nine years. Website defacement is an attack on a website that changes the visual appearance of the site or a webpage. These are typically the work of system crackers, who break into a web server and replace the hosted website with one of their own.

At present, there is no lead agency or law enforcement unit that is tasked to proactively deal with the threat of cyber crime in the country. The CIDG on the other hand is limited only to its role in the investigation of cyber crime incidents.

Part of Senate Bill No. 2796 and Senate Bill No. 2965’s provisions is the establishment of a Cybercrime Investigation and Coordination Centre which will be charged with protecting Filipino Internet users from fraud, theft, child pornography, and other crimes.

The Data Privacy Act, on the other hand, will establish regulations that meets global standards as prescribed by the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). It will require Filipino companies to adhere to international security standards in order to make the country’s information technology-business process outsourcing industry more secure and thus more attractive to foreign investors.

“Crime and harm are thus no longer merely physical--they can occur online as well. There is a need for us to innovate security measures and enact laws that will help protect us in the digital world,” stressed Angara.