The National Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-PH) hosted its annual National Cyber Drill Exercise on 26 November 2020. The remote exercise aims to help assess and improve the participating organizations’ incident response capabilities and communication effectiveness during and after a cyberattack.

The theme of this year’s drill is “Strengthening Cybersecurity and Adapting to the New Normal through Incident Response and Collaboration” which was based on the prevailing cybersecurity threats and malicious campaigns leveraging the COVID-19 pandemic.

The drill used a set of scenarios provided through email injects to facilitate participating teams in carrying out incident handling, investigation, analysis, remediation and reporting. Participants performed investigations on the artefacts and digital evidence associated with each drill scenario injects in order to answer questions/challenges and submit it to the CTFd platform. By the end of the drill, participants conducted a 5-minute presentation to report and account for all actions that had been carried out and piece together all the drill scenarios and presented it to their respective groups.

208 participants from 74 organizations of the different Critical Infostructure Sectors (Government and Emergency Services, Telecommunications, Energy, Water, Banking and Finance, Business Processing Outsource, Healthcare, Transport and Logistics, and Media), Academe, and Military participated in the cyber drill. Organizations, with or without prior experience in dealing with cyberthreats and attacks, were encouraged to join the online exercise.

Certificate of Participation will be provided to all the participants which shall form part of the requirements for Certificate of Cybersecurity Compliance (C3) in compliance to DICT Department Circular 003.

Testimonials

“Thank you DICT CERT-PH Team for inviting DOH to the CyberDrill 2020. It is the first time that the DOH has joined this kind of event and it surpassed our expectations. Joining this event has broadened our knowledge, skills, and ideas on how to analyze and respond to different kinds of cyber threats and attacks. We are looking forward to being invited next year and other CyberSecurity related activities in the future.  Again, Thank you very much and more power to your whole TEAM” said Mr. Joel Arias, Knowledge Management and Information Technology Service, Department of Health (DOH).

“I just wanted to share a quick note and let you know that you guys did a really good job. We’re glad that we decided to join this activity. It was a really interesting, informative and fruitful experience to us. We learned a lot in multiple areas of Cybersecurity. We are looking forward to more cybersecurity activities” said Mark Andro D. Garcia, MIS Technical Support, Department of Science and Technology – Advanced Science and Technology Institute (DOST-ASTI).

“The recently conducted 2020 Cyberdrill was a noteworthy manifestation of CERT-PH’s passion and energy in helping to ensure the security of government’s critical infostructure especially in this time of pandemic. It was honestly exciting and reminded us that data breaches happen daily and it’s not a matter of “if” but “when.” Once again, thank you! Great Job! See you next year!” said Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (Philhealth) Team.

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