Information Security Philippines

Executive Order No. 573 was issued by President Arroyo last October 26, 2006. E) 573 is meant to form an Anti-Fraud Task Force composed of the National Bureau of Investigation and the Philippine National Police and will be headed by Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez.

The task force’s main objective is to strengthen Republic Act 8484, or the Access Device Regulation Act of 1998.

“The occurrence of credit card fraud is increasing and acquiring banks incur huge losses and suffer stunted credit card sales, ultimately threatening the survival of the credit card industry, including the negative repercussions in the domestic economy,” the President said.

This comes after the Credit Card Association of the Philippines (CCAP) appealed to Malacañang to give more teeth to its laws against fraudsters using illegally obtained information from credit cards.

The CCAP complained that most of credit card fraudsters were able to walk away and disappear after being caught because of the absence of guidelines to govern the implementation of the country’s anti-fraud laws.

Although credit card fraud is not as widespread in the Philippines as in other countries — constituting less than one percent of credit card transactions here — the CCAP said there was a need for safeguards because of the inadequate security features of most credit cards in the country.

Secunia reports that an anonymous person discovered that it’s possible to partially spoof the Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 7.0 Address bar in a pop-up window, which might lead to phishing attacks. When showing an address with special characters, the Address bar might display incorrect or incomplete information to the user that tricks the user into unintended actions. Microsoft is aware of the problem, however no patch is available at this time. A workaround suggested by the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) is to disable Active Scripting in the Internet Zone.