Office of the Ombudsman's system hacked earlier this year, Martires tells solons
At A Glance
- The Office of the Ombudsman's system was hacked earlier this year, causing its decision writing process to get compromised, bared Ombudsman Samuel Martires.
(Unsplash)
The Office of the Ombudsman's system was hacked earlier this year, causing its decision writing process to get compromised.
Thus, bared Ombudsman Samuel Martires to members of the House Committee on Appropriations Monday, Sept. 11 during the Office of the Ombudsman's 2024 budget deliberation.
In the hearing, Martires told congressmen that their office is in dire need of additional information technology (IT) personnel.
"Itong taon po na ito nadiskubre po namin na na hack yung aming system. Yung mga may kaso pala sa amin, kaya pala alam nila kung nasaan na ang kanilang mga kaso, kasi tatlong tao pala ang nakatingin sa aming firewall," he shared.
(Earlier this year, we discovered that our system got hacked. It turned out that three of our people were looking at our firewall and feeding information on the status of cases to respondents.)
"Because of that, two of our personnel from the management information system are on preventive suspension," Marites said.
"Hindi ho biro na alam po ng respondent na ginagawa pa lang yung desisyon ay may nakakakita na (Fot the respondents to fins out the contents of the decision on them while they are being written is a big deal)," noted the Ombudsman, who essentially acts as the chief investigator and prosecutor in cases filed against government officials.
The problem became so serious that Martires said he "advised the lawyers not to use the Internet of the Office of the Ombudsman".
He didn't give any more details about the "hacking".
To address the problem, Martires said he reached out to a contact in Estonia who agreed to provide the Office of the Ombudsman with a software that could "teach us how to come up our own firewall".
However, Martires noted they would have to purchase new hardware for it.