By Junex Doronio

A RANKING official of the country’s health insurer said there are an estimated five million deceased Filipinos who are still in the database of the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth).

This was revealed by no less than PhilHealth President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Emmanuel Ledesma, Jr. before a Senate hearing on bills on e-governance on Wednesday, October 25.

“The thing with the PhilHealth database is, my understanding is we have to clean it up because I think there are around 4-5 million people who have already passed away, but hindi pa po natatanggal sa database (they have not been deleted from the database),” Ledesma bared.

He told the Senate panel that they had already coordinated with the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) to fix the problem of having “ghost members.”

For his part, DICT Undersecretary Jeffrey Ian Dy admitted that the incident happened after it “was left open.”

However, he assured members that despite the seeming “carelessness” of technicians there’s nothing to worry about.

“That website contains nothing. It was a test site that we used for checking vulnerabilities kasi we also have our own vulnerability assessment and penetration testing,” Dy said.

He added: “So siguro ang unfortunate lang is that after the testing it was left open. But we assure the public there’s really nothing there….it really contains no data.”

(ai/mnm)

By Junex Doronio

SHORT OF SAYING THAT AN IRRESPONSIBLE STATEMENT had been made by Department of Information and Communications Technology Secretary Ivan John Uy, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) on Wednesday has assured that there’s no damaging data breach in their agency.

This came on the heels of a report that millions of Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth) members were affected by the data breach in the state insurer’s system and Uy has revealed that another agency which he did not name also suffered a cyberattack and data involved could be “significant.”

“Malaki rin ito. Malaki ang pinsala dahil ang breach ay significant. We are currently waiting for them, for that agency to respond to all our requests,” Uy said.

The DICT head attended the DICT GIDAS Network Connectivity Initiative event in Taguig.

In a statement, the PSA said the Philippine Identification System (PhilSys), or the program running the country’s national ID implementation, and the Civil Registration System (CRS), which holds the database including birth certificates, “have not been affected.”

The agency, however, admitted that based on its initial assessment, the system allegedly affected was only limited to the Community-Based Monitoring System (CBMS).

“The PSA is assessing what personal data from the CBMS may have been compromised and will share information with the relevant authorities and the public in due course,” it said. (ai/mnm)