Senator Leila De Lima on Thursday sought an investigation into the serious data breach of court documents from the Office of the Solicitor General.
The detained lawmaker said the data breach could lead to severe consequences to ongoing judicial proceedings involving key government agencies.
De Lima filed Senate Resolution No. 713 urging the appropriate Senate Committee to probe the recent data breach and the cyber-attacks against the government and private firms in the country to end the abuse and misuse of pertinent information of the public.
Recently, UK Security company TurgenSec disclosed that some 345,000 sensitive court documents from the Office of the Solicitor General of the Philippines related to ongoing legal cases were made publicly available online and could have been accessed by anyone who knew where to look for at least two months.
TurgenSec said that the nature of these documents is alarming because it “may have the potential to disrupt [or] undermine ongoing judicial proceedings,” revealing that documents exposed were said to have contained sensitive keywords such as “Private”, “Confidential”, “Password” and “Witness.”
The security company likewise said that the breach also included topics on intelligence, terrorism, drugs, execution, the opposition, the military, on COVID-19, and even on President Rodrigo Duterte.
It also said that given the “particularly alarming” nature of the incident, it emailed the OSG and the Philippine government twice in March, but it did not get responses on both occasions.
De Lima, a former justice secretary, said the OSG should inform the Senate of the extent of damage caused by the cybersecurity breach, as well as the litigants whose information were compromised. ignored.”
This is neither the first attack against the OSG, nor an isolated incident. Hackers which identified themselves as the Phantom Troupe were able to deface the OSG website in December 2016.