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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4M'S (MOBILE MALWARE MAKING MILLIONS)

If in marketing there is 4P's, then here's the 4M's we should all be aware about. Hackers or malware writers are increasing tremendously nationwide and they are making a profit out of it not only on your personal computers but in mobile phones as well.

We all are aware of the mobile usage of the economy to this date. And believe it or not, hackers are also into this nowadays. Since we are all users, then we all should be aware of this jeopardy. Malwares are most common in usage of phone as payment mechanism, also termed as “Toll Fraud”, which is currently widespread in Russia, the Middle East, and parts of Europe.

It has been accounted that there is an 82 percent of user detections in June 2012. Imagine the huge percentage of industry business it had become in a month that it has a record of millions of dollars successfully stolen from the people, not to mention the transactions that are not successful.

Despite the growing issue of privacy on mobile devices, a significant component of users are still having a hard time coping with aggressive advertising techniques. It has been estimated that only 5 percent of Android applications include these aggressive players but were downloaded for over 80 million times. Why do people with privacy issues still download these advertisements and how does malware writers earn? The answer is simple, these techniques include the ever famous pushing out-of-app ads and with every click thereof comes the access of personal identifiable information without the user knowing. And these information about the user can be sold to companies who need it for a lot of financial compensation.

BOTTOMLINE: People need to be aware of the danger their mobile phones might get if they won't be aware of what they are hitting in those unsafe links and download buttons. They should also know that username and password left unprotected can also be hacked immediately. As suggested by the professionals, we should always sign-out or log-out our accounts specially if we are not using our own devices. Because if this continues to happen, then eventually people will lack trust in using mobile phones for transactions due to unending fraud.

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Or send us an inquiry at sales-apac@globalsign.com

Millions of Personally Identifiable Information Exposed

Government sector reported 268 incidents of data breaches which exposed 94 million personal identifiable information records.

In less than three years, the number of exposed government records tremendously increased leaving the public documents including those with personally identifiable information more vulnerable to unauthorized access. A recent report listed 268 successful incidents of data breaches among government sectors in the US. These figures are not much of a surprise especially with the ever-increasing rate of online threats*.

Government stated that they need to examine threats carefully so as to reduce risk of being hack again. With sensitive information compromised and made available to the public eyes, protecting critical infrastructures and information has been a great challenge for the government and other big organizations.

Security Solutions for Different Needs

No one's ever safe from the malicious intents of cybercrminals. Even the powerful and technologically advanced nations and corporations are not invincible to such threats. If leading nations are already struggling to keep their records from being compromised, the probability of being at risk may be double for unsuspecting individual users, small businesses, and third-world countries.

Many people are tempted to be part of the hacking society as it has proved to be one of the most lucrative crafts today. This fact alone makes it really hard for people to guard themselves from the hazards of online threats and data breaches.

GlobalSign, one of the largest trust services providers with global presence, offers a one-stop solution for all security concerns. GlobalSign's comprehensive product line ranges from SSL certificates to client certificates (Personal Sign, Document Sign, PDF Signing, Email Authentication) for both individual and enterprise use. GlobalSign certificates are protected by the highest encryption level available leaving customers at free of security concerns, thus allowing more time to attend to their respective businesses to achieve the best ROI. By partnering with the industry's largest names, GlobalSign is able to deliver timely and reliable solutions, and is still continuously coming up with new technologies which will revolutionize way data are protected online.

The GlobalSign team will be happy to assist you on your industry/business-specific needs. Visit www.globalsign.com.sg to know more about the solutions we offer. You may request a custom quote or send an inquiry to sales-apac@globalsign.com.

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