Philippines turns to hackers for help as US warns of China cyberthreat

MANILA: While recent tensions in the South China Sea have highlighted the Philippines’ maritime vulnerabilities, the more insidious risk of state-sponsored cyberattacks - and a lack of resources to handle them - may be the country’s bigger challenge.

In a November report, a Chinese group known as Stately Taurus was blamed for an attack that had compromised a Philippine government agency for five days earlier in 2023, coinciding with clashes between the two countries’ ships in the South China Sea. Stately Taurus’s operations "align with geopolitical topics of interest to the Chinese government,” according to Palo Alto Networks, the US cybersecurity firm that produced the report.