Cybercrime spikes in Phl

Upgrade to High-Speed Internet for only ₱1499/month!

Enjoy up to 100 Mbps fiber broadband, perfect for browsing, streaming, and gaming.

Visit Suniway.ph to learn

According to Check Point Software Technologies Ltd., a pioneer and global leader of cybersecurity solutions based in Tel Aviv, Israel and with offices in the US, it has noticed a 423 percent surge in phishing sites in the Philippines as cybercriminals industrialize fraud in the country.

Check Point this week unveiled its Philippine Threat Landscape Report 2025 during the inaugural CXO Elite Club Philippines dinner, a private, invitation-only gathering of select senior leaders and industry decision-makers.

The report reveals a dramatically intensified cyber risk environment, where cybercriminals have pivoted from isolated technical attacks to systemic, industrialized operations targeting our  mobile-first population.

Based on data gathered by Check Point Exposure Management Research, there appears to be an expansion of cloud adoption, and vendor reliance is widening the national attack surface faster than many organizations can secure it.

According to Check Point, there has been a phishing and  smishing explosion in the Philippines, with phishing websites surging  from 731 in 2024 to 3,824 in 2025, a 423 percent  increase.

Smishing (SMS phishing) has become the dominant threat, with attackers now using telecom-level manipulation to bypass mobile trust barriers.

Check Point said ransomware attacks have nearly doubled, with recorded attacks growing  from just nine in 2024 to 17 in 2025.

The  Qilin ransomware group, a Russia-based group, emerged as the most aggressive actor, using cross-platform ransomware and double extortion tactics to prey on industries ranging from finance and retail to health care, manufacturing, food, business services, media and real estate.

Additionally, the company said social media impersonations have gone up by 37 percent. Fake executive and brand profiles jumped from 940 cases to 1,291 cases.

Banks, it was revealed,  are the hardest hit, as attackers leverage AI chatbots to push investment scams and scale financial deception.

They stressed that there is accelerating data exposure, with  source code leaks more than doubled (from 38 to 81), while third-party breach incidents also doubled (from eight  to 29), confirming the Philippines’ growing supply-chain exposure.

The Check Point research highlights that financial fraud and e-gaming schemes are no longer amateur operations. Powered by underground SIM card markets and celebrity deepfakes, these fraud ecosystems now function as full-scale cross-border operations rather than isolated scams.

Among the key targets identified in the report are the following:

* Government and the public sector, which face high-visibility Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and defacements tied to political events and hacktivism.

A DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic from multiple, often compromised, sources (a “botnet). It renders online services unavailable to legitimate users by exhausting bandwidth or system resources.

* Financial services, which  suffer massive fraud exposure through account takeovers, brand impersonation and credential harvesting.

* Critical infrastructure that are  targeted by disruption-focused reconnaissance and DDoS attempts, particularly during periods of geopolitical tension.

* Education platforms that are frequently used as “test beds” for emerging threat actors due to lower cyber maturity.

Check Point predicts that this year will see AI amplify existing fraud vectors, rather than replacing them, making scams faster, more believable and more widespread.

Additionally, Near Field Communication or NFC payment fraud is expected to rise alongside Google Pay, and the expansion of local e-wallets.

NFC payment is a secure, contactless, “tap-and-go” payment technology that allows devices — such as smartphones, smartwatches or credit cards — to communicate with a payment terminal using radio frequencies within a few centimeters. It enables quick transactions by securely transmitting encrypted payment data via mobile wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay.

Supply-chain breaches are also projected to escalate as more Philippine organizations integrate AI tools and cloud-based services into their workflows.

Deepfakes and misinformation, according to Check Point, will increasingly target brands, executives and political institutions.

The report concluded that the Philippine threat landscape has shifted toward high-impact, high-visibility, low-complexity vectors, focusing on phishing, identity abuse, external misconfigurations and cloud-based exposures.

These systemic changes, Check Point said, require a fundamental shift in national defensive strategies to protect the country’s digital economy.

“Cyber attacks in the Philippines are no longer defined by technical sophistication, but by scale, automation and deception,” said Ritchelle Santos, senior cyber threat intelligence analyst at Check Point Exposure Management Research.

According to Santos, “In an environment where identity, trust and mobile channels are the new battleground, the safest organizations will be those that protect their digital footprints as carefully as they protect their networks. Staying safe now means verifying everything — every message, every transaction and every identity — every time.”

Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. is a leading protector of digital trust, utilizing AI-powered cyber security solutions to safeguard over 100,000 organizations globally.

The Philippine Threat Landscape Report of Check Point Software Technologies should serve as a wake-up call not just to the government, the business sector and all institutions that are digitizing, but also to the general public — from parents to their children who are increasingly depending on digital transactions in terms of payments and banking transactions, blissfully ignorant about the threat or even attacks that may already be occurring, as most attacks are handled and quietly resolved most of the time by the affected institutions for fear of causing panic among their clients.

How many times have we heard about government institutions, specifically being attacked and their database exposed, but more often than not brushed off lightly by our officials with the simple assurance that the data is safe.

The lack of transparency on the frequency of such attacks leaves Filipinos unaware that perhaps their data is actually already in the dark web, thus the reason for some successful isolated individual attacks that, of course, are harder to resolve.