At the end of March Anonymous Philippines hacked the COMELEC website and as is typical replaced the site with some vague message about why they executed the hack. It was later determined that it was more than just a website hack but actually a full-on data breach of millions of voter records.
A lot of international news and blog properties made a big issue of things including Wired UK, BBC News and even the likes of Gizmodo. They bandied about big statements about this being the biggest breach of personal data in history and observations like how the data itself was a horrible database that was clearly evidence of shoddy copying and pasting by COMELEC officials.
Now that multiple sites sharing the voter database have been published with the help of LulzSec Pilipinas, it has finally become a big deal locally, which is about 10 days after the international news agencies were talking about things. What's the deal people? Do we feel no sense of ownership over our own data?
But this is unsurprising - it's not like we've invested significantly in cyber security. Most government websites are a joke and agencies are scrambling for funds, so things like website development get the tailend of the funding pool. There's a lot of systematic stupidity that led to this happening. And we can only hope that the incoming government manages to find the finds to address things - where the money will come from I have no idea.
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