PH has potential to lead cybersecurity via AI — exec

Rodrigues estimated that the Philippines has only around 200 cybersecurity professionals compared to around 3,000 in Singapore. (Pexels photo)

MANILA – An executive of Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Monday said there is an opportunity for the Philippines to become a leader in cybersecurity through the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI).

During an online press conference, Phil Rodrigues, AWS Commercial head of security for Asia Pacific and Japan, said generative AI can train cybersecurity professionals in the Philippines and “leap ahead” of its current status.

Rodrigues estimated that the Philippines has only around 200 cybersecurity professionals compared to around 3,000 in Singapore.

“I do see an opportunity for the Philippines to have a leadership role in cybersecurity,” he said.

He cited existing AI tools such as Amazon Inspector — an automated vulnerability management service that scans workloads for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure — and Amazon CodeWhisperer, a productivity tool that generates real-time single or full-function secure code suggestions for developers.

“What we’re finding now is that augmenting developers with data security tools can improve code security. That’s a very practical and a very ‘now’ place that the Philippines can start,” he said.

Launched in February 2022, AWS’ re/Start program provides free skills training to inspire Filipinos to transition into a career in cloud computing through collaboration with two local organizations.

AWS has also launched its AI Ready program that commits to providing free AI skills training to two million people worldwide by 2025.

It includes eight new free AI and generative AI courses, AWS generative AI scholarship, and collaboration with Code.org to help students learn about generative AI.

“We like to democratize security, we look at how to protect ourselves, and we take that opportunity and turn it into tools to help our customers protect themselves. We’re democratizing technology and security,” Rodrigues said.

He estimated that MadPot — Amazon’s threat intelligence tool that creates phony digital targets that lure attackers to study and counter their methods — gets more than 100 million connection attempts per day.

“There is a very high global activity on this. The most common, generally, are credential attacks.

This continues to be the number one way to attack a system,” he said.

Meanwhile, Oliver Klein, AWS chief technologist in Asia Pacific, highlighted the company’s investments in the Philippines such as the launch of AWS Local Zones in Manila in June 2023.

AWS Local Zones place computing, storage, database, and other select services closer to large populations, enabling single-digit latency to end-users.

Other AWS investments include the availability of Amazon Interactive Video Service points of presence in April 2022, AWS outposts in April 2021, and Amazon CloudFront in December 2014.

AI Singapore (AISG) — a program launched by Singapore’s National Research Foundation — is building SEA-LION, a family of large language models (LLM) that is specifically pre-trained and instruct-tuned to be more culturally accurate, localized, and tailored to Southeast Asian languages and cultures.

SEA-LION is being built on AWS’ scalable computer infrastructure and has been available on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart since February.