The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) confirmed on Thursday, Oct. 12, that the hacking incident on the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) systems was not ransomware, but posits that further actions were needed to catch the culprit.

“Kinukumpirma ng DICT na ang insidente sa PSA ay hindi isang ransomware attack at kasalukuyan itong nagsasagawa ng mga nararapat na hakbang upang mapanagot ang threat actor na siyang responsable sa data breach,” DICT said.

“Kasalukuyang iniimbestigahan ng DICT ang logs upang malaman ang saklaw ng data breach at kung may personal identifiable information na maaaring na-kompromisa,” it added.

DICT urged the public to prevent posting links that allegedly contain data from PSA as they are malware, and anyone caught distributing said links are liable to the Data Privacy Act of 2012.

“Habang isinasagawa ng DICT ang pagsusuri sa logs ng PSA, hinihikayat ng DICT ang publiko na huwag magpakalat ng posts o links na umano’y naglalaman ng PSA data samples,” it said.

The information and communications agency added that further technical assistance was being carried out to solve cyber issues that plague government agencies.

“Inaasahan ng DICT na tatalima at ipapatupad ng mga ahensiya ang mga rekomendasyon ng kagawaran,” DICT added.

PSA earlier began its investigation on the alleged data breach in its monitoring system.