rappler.com/ThomsonReutersFounation-July 12
The Philippines ranks second – after Mongolia – among countries most plagued by web threats worldwide, according to a 2022 report by global cybersecurity company Kaspersky. When hackers targeted independent Filipino news outlet Bulatlat.com, flooding its website with a torrent of rogue traffic, staff had to rely on digital forensics experts in Sweden to track down the perpetrators. “Building the case means you must come up with evidence. But digital forensics is something we simply don’t have any resources for,” said Frank Lloyd Tiongson of the National Union of People’s Lawyers, which represented Bulatlat over the 2018 attack. Whether targeting ordinary people, journalists, or activists, online threats from doxxing to domain blocking and digital surveillance are rising in the Philippines and other Southeast Asian nations, highlighting a lack of resources and expertise to fight them, experts say. Governments are often behind such online threats in nations including Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar and the Philippines, said Bangkok-based digital rights group, DigitalReach, a global phenomenon dubbed digital authoritarianism. “It’s become a trend in Southeast Asia when a repressive government knows how important the digital space is for civil society and thinks it’s part of the state’s job to control it,” Sutawan Chanprasert, DigitalReach’s founder, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Last month, two Thai activists sued the government for allegedly using Pegasus spyware to monitor their mobile devices. The hacking on Bulatlat five years ago, which the newspaper says was “targeted, deliberate and well-organized,” was the first known distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against a Filipino media organization. Read more at: https://www.rappler.com/nation/philippines-activists-fight-back-online-threats-rise/
