The Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) on Tuesday, Feb. 13 confirmed that 28 government agencies have received hoax bomb threats via email, all originating from the same foreign suspect.
CICC Executive Director Alexander Ramos in a press briefing said the department identified over “28 government agencies within the National Capital Region (NCR) alone that received this email from a sender based in Japan.”
“It points to the same sender and it did not come from different sources,” he said in reference to the information gathered.
Ramos also mentioned that the email server has been a "problem" since 2021.
“His case has been present since 2021—this particular email has reached different countries Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and as of yesterday, two countries were hit—the Philippines and Malaysia coming from the same email server,” he said.
Ramos added that the same content was also sent to these countries—threatening to bomb railway stations, buildings, or government offices.
The department said the suspect they had last year has denied it had something to do with this and somebody was only “using his identity.”
‘In full control’
Meanwhile, amid the discussion, the CICC assured the public that the government was in "full control" of the situation.
“At present, the government is in full control, we know we have traced and we have full details of this spread of malicious information that has affected several government agencies,” Ramos said.
Given this, the department requested the Japanese government to investigate the email server hosting the malicious content.
"We want to put a spot on it by writing a formal request to a representative of the government of Japan," the director said.
“In fact, we requested that they conduct an internal investigation in Japan, why would such content proliferate coming from Japan,” he added.
READ:
https://mb.com.ph/2024/2/13/cicc-japan-gov-t-collaborate-to-investigate-hoax-bomb-threats
Ramos stressed that the Japanese government is now coordinating with the necessary offices to locate and stop it.
“They will give us feedback as soon as they have the results,” he said.