Why is there a strong online presence ahead of the news of the Holy Week long weekend
By Claire Huang
As a predominantly Catholic country, the Philippines considers Holy Week as an important national holiday that is awaited every year, with long weekends starting from Maundy Thursday until Easter Sunday.
As Filipinos observe Holy Week rituals like the Visitua Iglesia, cyber attackers see this long break as an opportunity to target businesses that are operating with reduced staff and slow response times.
In 2020, a terrifying cyberattack with malware and identity theft was carried out over a long weekend at a major commercial bank owned by the Philippine government. Cyber attackers used the long Independence Day weekend and stole millions of pesos, hacking systems to access Internet transfers and ATM withdrawals.
Ironically, while businesses in the Philippines are using the cloud and AI to scale, attackers are using the same technology to launch automated attacks to break into these systems.
In the third quarter of 2025, data breaches increased to 49%, highlighting how AI-enabled attacks are increasing the speed and scale of cyber attacks in general. Notable among these are phishing campaigns, data mining, and sophisticated ransomware attacks.
Without the implementation of the National Cybersecurity Plan 2023-2028, the digital transformation of the Philippines may overtake the cyber defenses of organizations. AI-generated phishing emails are designed to appear authentic, collecting and analyzing information from the publicly available web. AI also enables more advanced forms of credential abuse, allowing attackers to analyze login patterns by replicating login times or locations, predict password variations, and mimic legitimate employee behavior. These AI-enabled attacks can dynamically adapt to bypass security filters and obfuscation-based identification systems, and gain unauthorized access to corporate networks.
As Holy Week approaches, businesses should be aware of ransomware attacks that are often designed to remain silent within systems, identify critical infrastructure and attack at vulnerable times, such as holidays.
The latest findings from the Synology 2025 ASEAN Digital Transformation Trend Survey for IT professionals highlight the growing scale of the problem. More than 55% of organizations reported that they had been attacked or were about to be attacked by ransomware, while 22% said they had already been victims of similar incidents.
As these threats become harder to detect and prevent, businesses can no longer rely on prevention alone. The availability and availability of data recovery solutions today can empower businesses, especially during critical downtime.
For businesses whose critical success is attributed to maintaining the security of customer data, a data breach from an AI-enabled cyber attack can result in loss of revenue, impact performance, and reputational damage. Once this happens, there is no turning back. Not having a clear response plan is costly. To minimize disruption, businesses must prioritize fast data recovery and accelerated response times.
According to the same ASEAN survey, only 22% of organizations said they had a lot of confidence in their crisis resolution strategies, while 47% reported having some confidence in their ability to restore operations after a cyber incident. Assessment procedures also highlight the readiness gap. More than one in five organizations test their data acquisition systems less than once a year, while 15% do not test them at all.
As artificial intelligence continues to reshape the cyber threat landscape, preventing every attack is no longer a reality. Cyber resilience is a new priority for organizations – keeping backups of secure data, isolating recovery points, and ensuring that systems can be restored quickly in the event of incidents.
Solutions like Synology ActiveProtect are designed to support this change by empowering businesses and organizations to reduce manual workloads, standardize support and recovery processes, save time, and ensure continuous operations.
Strengthening cyber resilience is key to protecting operations and data in these times of constant threat, not to mention providing peace of mind, so all business leadership can focus on the long holiday break.
Claire Huang is the Country Manager of Synology Philippines.
