The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has urged financial institutions to overhaul their cybersecurity frameworks to counter the threat of “frontier” artificial intelligence systems capable of launching automated, multi-stage cyberattacks, a regulatory document showed.
In a memorandum issued to all BSP-supervised institutions, the central bank warned that advanced AI models can now identify software vulnerabilities and execute exploits with minimal human intervention.
“While access to these systems remains restricted… their emergence signals a shift toward increasingly adaptive and scalable cyber threats,” BSP Deputy Governor Lyn I. Javier said in the directive.
Discontinue Traditional Passwords
As part of the new guidelines, the central bank ordered financial institutions to discontinue the use of traditional passwords and communication-based authentication, such as SMS or push notifications, for administrative and privileged access to protect against AI-driven social engineering.
Instead, institutions must adopt hardware security keys, smart cards, or hardware-backed certificate-based authentication. The BSP also urged banks to deploy AI-enabled defensive capabilities for patch management, continuous threat hunting, and virtual patching.
The cybersecurity push comes amid a massive surge in digital transaction volumes in the Southeast Asian nation, which has heightened the urgency of safeguarding its electronic payment infrastructure.
Data from the central bank showed that combined transaction values on the country’s two main automated clearing houses, InstaPay and PESONet, surged 44% year-on-year to 13.1 trillion pesos ($224 billion) as of May, driven by 3.5 billion transactions.
The rapid growth prompted the BSP in June to lift a years-long moratorium on InstaPay and PESONet transaction fee increases, replacing it with a new framework that allows market-based adjustments provided banks can mathematically justify the costs to regulators.
Philippine Finance Secretary Frederick Go has pushed for digital transfer costs to be slashed to between 2 and 5 pesos per transaction from current rates of up to 50 pesos, as the government aims to digitalize up to 70% of retail payments by 2028.
This article is published on BitPinas: BSP Urges Banks to Strengthen Cybersecurity Against AI-Powered Cyberattacks
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