Manila: Local broadband service provider Converge has blocked around 183 billion attempts to access illegal sites in 2024, around 18 times as much as the attempts from 2021 to 2023. In a statement Tuesday, Converge chief information security officer Andrew Malijan said these attempts were made to 683,000 uniform resource locators (URLs) or domains that were blocked by the company.

According to Philippines News Agency, Malijan stated, “Acting on reports and submissions of government agencies as well as private entities, last year, we added 150,000 URLs or domains into our system that we tagged as illicit or unlawful. Traffic to these newly-enrolled URLs must have been quite heavy as we managed to block almost 20 times as many attempts in 2024, as we did in the years 2021-2023, which was just 10-12 billion attempts.”

Malijan explained that the 150,000 URLs were classified into categories such as child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), online abuse or exploitation of children (OSAEC), phishing/banking, online gambling, and voyeurism. He noted that CSAM/OSAEC accounted for nearly 98 percent of the total blocked attempts, followed by online gambling.

He attributed the sudden surge in entry attempts to illegal sites to the influence of artificial intelligence (AI). “These attempts on our customer network are most likely hinged on AI – hackers and malicious agents are no longer doing this manually or through human intervention,” Malijan said.

In response to these developments, Malijan emphasized that the company will not only continue banning similar attempts but also utilize AI to identify more malicious sites. “It’ll be down to AI vs. AI. That’s what we’re doing, internally, to protect our network in Converge,” he concluded.