Philippine Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, Signed

Cybercrime Prevention Act 2012, (Senate Bill 2769) a bill which allows authorities to examine and investigate people for internet-related crimes, was signed last Monday, September 12, 2012, by the Philippines Senate.

To this date, criminals are rampant not only on sidewalks, streets, and dark places, but also in cyberspace. People can easily hack accounts and steal identities and intellectual properties. The high risk this poses to government, enterprises, and individuals served as the catalyst for Philippine authorities to draft a bill ensuring prevention of unwanted cyber theft.

The bill contains a number of punishable offenses including, but not exclusive to (a) illegal access to a computer system (b) illegal interception of data (c) data interference (including international alteration or damaging of data) (d) system interference (including damaging or altering computer data or programs) (e) use, production, sale, procurement, importation, distribution or making it available without right of malware, passwords or codes, and (f) all computer-related forgery, fraud or identity theft.

There have been global government-initiated efforts to combat cybercrimes. Even the United States, District Court of Virginia commissioned Microsoft to start the move towards reducing, and possibly having zero-cybercrime rate*.

Philippine government allotted an annual budget of Php50 million for the implementation of the law. With the bill about to be executed, it is expected cybercrimes will diminish in number, though understandable that it’s near to impossible these malicious intents come to a complete stop. Even with the bill, people are still not hundred percent sure and guaranteed of their security online. What’s good about the new law is that it will require enterprises, and individual businessmen running their electronic commerce business to follow stringent security rules. The bill does not specify which security features are to use and which technology to employ. It uses ‘tools’ as the words to describe them, but these can understandably be the SSL certificates, and digital signatures.

GlobalSign, being one of the world's largest SSL and client certificate provider, has just the right solutions for different needs. GlobalSign offers a wide range of trust services and products. It offers SSL certificates secured by the highest encryption level available to date, 2048-bit encryption. You may choose among Domain Validation SSL, Organization Validation SSL, and Extended Validation SSL. The latter would be the best choice should you want to give your customers the best and most secure surfing experience. Moreover, GlobalSign also offers cost efficient solutions for those having a number of domains and subdomains to secure – SANs and Wildcard SSL, respectively. Subject Alternative Name (SAN) is utilized by multi-domain SSL certificates from GlobalSign to enable you the flexibility to secure up to 40 different domain names, subdomain, and public IP addresses using only one SSL certificate and IP address.

Moreover, GlobalSign also offers a range of digital certificates both for enterprise and individual use including Personal Sign, which allows customers to digitally sign emails and Microsoft office documents, PDF sign, allows digital signing of PDF documents, and code signing, which allows developers to digitally sign their applications and programs.

It is expected that the implementation of the bill and customers’ willingness to abide by the rules will significantly lower the risks of online theft. Get your security products from GlobalSign and enjoy full assistance from fully qualified local technical support.

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