PNP to deploy ‘ethical’ hackers to catch web intruders

With the website of the Philippine National Police under constant intrusion, the police information technology management service (ITMS) has decided to deploy “ethical” hackers to thwart the intruders.

“If you want to know how the hackers do it, you need to be a hacker, too. But ethical,” said ITMS planning and public information officer Chief Insp. Jhoanna Garcia Fabro in a press briefing on Friday in Camp Crame.

“We are building our pool of ethical hackers so that we’ll be able to check the vulnerability of our systems, networks and databases,” Fabro said.

The move will boost the PNP’s capacity to check hacking activities, such as defacing the PNP website or extracting confidential data from the national police, she said.

However, Fabro  declined to give details of the recruitment of “ethical” hackers who would be helping the police protect the PNP cyberinfrastructure.

According to the ITMS web service head, Chief Insp. Felizardo Eubra, the PNP’s webpage is a “targeted website” and any attack against it will  have “political implications.”

Constant monitoring

“We are constantly monitoring suspicious hacking activities,” Eubra said. “We are very watchful when it comes to that. We are resisting a number of attacks daily.  We are being probed continuously, 24 hours a day.”

He said ITMS aimed to be on constant alert to deter any attack.

Eubra said there was no 100-percent security, and that police chased away hackers cat-and-mouse style.

“We have levels of security and we treat every level of security as critical,” he added.

The most effective way to stop hacking is to frustrate the web intrusion by putting up measures that will isolate the attack on the PNP’s infrastructure on the internet, according to Eubra.

“We cannot stop a determined hacker,” he said. “What we can do is … make it harder for him to do it so that in the process, he will lose that motivation.”

After an intrusion is blocked, the ITMS would work with the Anti-Cyber Crime Group to identify the hacker, Fabro said.

“We have to protect the critical infrastructure of the PNP in cyberspace,” she said. “Not only do we deter hackers but [we] also identify and neutralize them.”