Philippines Warns Of Cyber Intrusions Aiming At Sensitive Government Data - 1

Photo by Myk Miravalles on Unsplash

Philippines Warns Of Cyber Intrusions Aiming At Sensitive Government Data

  • Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert

The government of the Philippines announced this Tuesday that foreign malicious actors attempted to access their intelligence data.

In a Rush? Here are the Quick Facts!

  • The Philippine government reported multiple attacks and data theft attempts by foreign cyber threats.
  • Minister Ivan Uy said that malicious actors did not breach safety systems that have been working properly.
  • Authorities are working with military forces and international organizations to improve security and address the situation.

According to Reuters , the minister for information and communications Ivan Uy said they noticed multiple attempts to steal data but hackers failed to breach the government’s system.

“These have been present for quite some time, and threats come from many actors, but a big majority of them are foreign,” said Uy to Reuters. “Why are these things operating in those systems, without even anybody calling it out?”

The Advanced Persistent Threats have not attacked critical infrastructures and the government’s security and safety systems have been working properly, but authorities acknowledged difficulties in identifying the attackers as they leave misleading traces.

The Philippines is already working with other organizations, countries, and military forces—through diplomatic strategies—to address this situation, strengthen defenses, and validate threats.

Last year, hackers from China attempted to break into email systems and websites in the Philippines, but authorities also prevented this.

“World War III is happening and it is cyber,” added Uy. “These weapons are non-kinetic. They are cyber, digital, virtual, but it’s happening, but the attacks and defenses are happening as we speak, without any physical manifestation.”

The minister also raised concerns about the surge of deepfakes, disinformation, and misinformation created with the help of AI tools, viewing them as an increasing threat to democratic governments.

A recent British study also warned about AI misinformation and noted the increasing risk of bank runs.

Musk Releases AI Model Grok 3 And Claims It Outperforms Rivals - 2

Photo by Mariia Shalabaieva on Unsplash

Musk Releases AI Model Grok 3 And Claims It Outperforms Rivals

  • Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert
  • Fact-Checked by Sarah Frazier Former Content Manager

Elon Musk and team members of his artificial intelligence company, xAI, announced the release of Grok 3 this Tuesday, the newest and most advanced model of their chatbot. They claimed the new AI model can outperform frontier models like ChatGPT and DeepSeek.

In a Rush? Here are the Quick Facts!

  • Musk and xAI’s team announced the new AI model, Grok 3, and claimed it outperforms GPT-4o, DeepSeek V-3, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini-Pro.
  • The new model is available to Premium X subscribers.
  • The team also announced a deep search tool for more complex tasks.

xAI’s team and Musk announced the new model during a livestream shared on the social media platform X.

https://t.co/HTK4u2aYRu — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 18, 2025

“We’re very excited to present Grok 3, which is, we think, an order of magnitude more capable than Grok 2 in a very short period of time,” said Musk.

The team explained a few of the challenges they faced—they had to delay the release due to multiple situations—and built a large data center in Memphis to train Grok 3, with 200,000 GPUs. According to TechCrunch , Grok 3 had been promised for 2024 but missed the deadline.

In January, xAI launched an iOS app for its chatbot Grok in the United States, India, and Australia.

Musk and his team showed how the new AI model outperformed GPT-4o, DeepSeek V-3, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini-Pro in benchmarks such as AIME and GPQA.

They also announced a research feature “DeepSearch”—similar to OpenAI’s deep research feature to perform complex tasks and research online—considering data from the social media platform X as well.

A few experts have already shared thoughts and reviews of the new reasoning model. Andrej Karpathy, Perplexity’s CEO, said on X he tested the tool with multiple queries to analyze its potential.

“I was given early access to Grok 3 earlier today, making me I think one of the first few who could run a quick vibe check,” wrote Karpathy. “The impression overall I got here is that this is somewhere around o1-pro capability, and ahead of DeepSeek-R1, though of course we need actual, real evaluations to look at.”