The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
To address cybersecurity challenges in the country, the De La Salle College of Saint Benilde Hub of Innovation for Inclusion (HiFi) collaborated with the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) to cover concerns, such as phishing, intrusion detection, security automation, and adversarial artificial intelligence (AI).
CICC, an attached agency of the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), has the mandate to formulate a national cybersecurity plan and prevention and suppression of cybercrime.
It was created upon the approval of Republic Act 10175 or the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012.
Benilde HiFi is a Technology Business Incubator (TBI) for startups engaged in innovative industries. It is accredited by the Department of Science and Technology-Philippine Council for Industry, Energy, and Emerging Technology Research and Development (DOST-PCIEERD).
“I consulted with CICC and met with their high officials and Highly Technical Consultants (HTCs),” Benilde HiFi director Paul Pajo noted.
Academe involvement
The DOST-PCIEERD called for the higher education institutions to pitch projects relevant to its research and development agenda.
The agency’s consultants visited the school’s facility for the scheduled research proposal orientation.
The CICC members assisted in the draft of several critical and important parts of the proposals. Ricson Que, a faculty member of the Benilde Cybersecurity Program under the School of Management and Information Technology (SMIT), has submitted the final output through an e-proposal online system.
Pajo mentioned the proposal is for a DOST-PCIEERD research and development program called “Implementing the New Generation Cybersecurity Capability for the Philippines”.
A total of seven cybersecurity-related proposals were handed in by the college – from the Cyber Security program of SMIT-ACI which was finally consolidated to three proof-of-concept proposals submitted by Que.
One of the projects is the automation of digital forensics with DevOps, which aims to probe into the application of practices and tools to automate and streamline digital forensics workflows.
Another is the development of adversarial AI strategies for cybercrime investigation that can detect AI-powered frauds, including election disinformation and financial scams.
Defense mechanism against smishing threats
The CICC has likewise teamed up with Benilde to develop an anti-smishing tool, a P15-million research project funded by the DOST.
Titled “Behavioral Biometrics and Content Analysis: A Multi-Pronged Machine Learning Approach to Thwarting SMS Phishing (Smishing),” the program intends to detect and curb this cybersecurity attack.
It strives to develop machine learning algorithms which can analyze patterns to determine anomalies indicative of a smishing attempt. The program will also integrate natural language processing, a branch of artificial intelligence, to analyze the content of SMS messages and pinpoint phishing attempts that can cause identity theft or other fraudulent activities.
Smishing happens when attackers use bogus messages to deceive victims into revealing confidential information, downloading malware, or visiting malicious websites. Examples are bank fraud alerts, account verification, and lottery winning scams.
“Smishing continues to be a major concern in the Philippines. We need new capstone projects like this with the De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde to help CICC in the prevention and suppression of cybercrime,” CICC Executive Director Usec. Alexander Ramos said in an official statement.