According to the Nexusguard Annual Threat Report Q3 for 2021, it says that during the pandemic, cyber attackers targeted industries providing connectivity, services and entertainment to populations forced to shelter-in-place, resulting in a 341% year-over-year increase in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
“During 2020, the pandemic forced a complete shift in how the world lived and worked, and attackers were ready to take full advantage of the situation, adeptly targeting connectivity and entertainment providers,” said Juniman Kasman, chief technology officer for Nexusguard. “With attackers using stealthier, smaller attacks increasing in complexity, Communications Service Providers (CSP) and enterprises will need deep learning, multidimensional DDoS detection and other advanced techniques to avoid outages.”
This highlights the important need to increase vigilance on cyberattacks and it starts with enhancing the learning capacity of Filipinos on cybersecurity. Founded in 2008, Nexusguard Academy has developed partnerships with different well-known universities, colleges, and companies to launch the Cybersecurity Specialist Program to provide world-class education here in the Philippines. The program was launched for beginners which contain a defense-in-depth program providing a methodological approach in learning skills in securing web applications, incident response, and understanding security controls which are relevant with the cybersecurity attacks recently.
Nexusguard Academy Program Director, Ruben Mondejar said, “Nexusguard Academy was established to offer cybersecurity courses, where the program helps to enable CSP to become cybersecurity managed providers and helps individuals to be trained by their practitioners who have years of experience in the front lines.”
From the initial mission of helping CSPs, Nexusguard’s vision has expanded to also help individuals affected by the pandemic, by assisting career shifters to be immersed in the field of cybersecurity. They leverage their practitioners to be the mentors in this highly industry-relevant and workplace-centric learning for their learners.
Mondejar added, “The passion of bringing cybersecurity learning doesn’t stop there. We also worked to expand the reach not only in Metro Manila but also to the provinces in offering their certification programs like our partnership with Siena College of Taytay, the first in CALABARZON.”
This partnership now expands to Batangas by building a Center of Excellence in Equinox Training Center in Sta Teresita Batangas which is a TESDA accredited facility. Prudencio “Dacio” Guttierez, former mayor of Padre Garcia said, “This will bring world-class cybersecurity education in Batangas which we hope to be expanded to other Universities in Batangas the upcoming months.”
Launched in Singapore in 2021, the Nexusguard’s Cybersecurity Specialist Program aims to help training individuals to relaunch their careers. The program will run in six months that will teach the students about information security and cybersecurity domain topics so they can gain the essential skills required to be competitive. Inclusive in the program are industry and practitioner mentoring, a portfolio with real-life companies, and learner support assistance allowing the learners to gain additional soft skills and an employee assistance program. Through this, the new skill set they acquired from the program will be matched to the requirements of companies in the industry.
“Nexusguard Academy is not only planning to offer information security and cybersecurity skills enhancement but will also be offering coding for children in 2022. With the popularity of online gaming platforms, this is the best time to get the kids to learn and have fun while learning. With high hopes, they look forward to developing the next generation of experts in our country to defend our Philippine Cyberspace,” Mondejar said.