Global Chain of Trust aims to reduce online child exploitation

Online cybersecurity branch, the Global Chain of Trust (GCT) has been launched with the purpose to help ISPs protect their customer’s data and to help counter online child exploitation.

The GCT will become the first line of defence for the internet and is aimed at helping ISPs protect their customers and their data and enabling individual businesses to protect themselves from all manner of cyber-attacks.

Created by Angel Redoble, chairman and founding president of the Philippine Institute of Cyber Security Professionals (PICSPro) and group CISO at PLDT Group & Smart Communications.

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The GCT will also meet requests from such organisations as Interpol, Unicef and ASEAN, for public and private organisations to work together to protect the vulnerable online.

Redoble said the GCT will create a cleaner, safer, faster and more resilient cyberspace that will provide benefits for SMEs and large enterprises alike, but also protect the most vulnerable sector in our society – the individual users, and crucially, children.

“There is no guardian of the internet domain name system (DNS) space to verify the legitimacy of websites. The aim is that GCT will virtually become that guardian. By building an ecosystem in which it creates an internet bubble that is safer, trusted, and resilient for all. It enables ISPs to be able to protect their infrastructure and make security services available for all,” he said.

With GCT, all the domains will be registered, verified, and categorised as trusted to be enrolled into the Chain of Trust locally to each of the ISP or DNS hosting providers.

According GCT, these trusted domains will then be shared among the partners within the ecosystem. As the GCT ecosystem grows, it will benefit the internet communities, indirectly, creating a safer, faster and more resilient Internet world.

Using a more secure DNS infrastructure, the idea itself will solve major Internet outages if current DNS infrastructures and communication processes are compromised.”

The GCT offers cybersecurity protection to address the issues of phishing, scams, and illegitimate websites that are causing the vulnerable to suffer — especially those not versed with the intricacies of the internet.

The DNS is one of the foundations of the internet, working in the background to match the names of websites that people type into a search box with the corresponding IP address.

Redoble said the internet today is in utter chaos with no single entity in control, creating enormous vulnerabilities and multiple loopholes and gaps to be exploited.

He explained, “Unfortunately, this is not just an issue for governments and businesses, but for wider society, as children all over the planet are also being left open to exploitation.

“The GCT of technology, will - via partnerships with ISPs, telecoms and government departments deploying the technology - safeguard the Internet, ensuring that trillions of dollars are not lost to cyber criminals, securing against national security threats and ensuring children globally can safely use the Internet for educational and leisure purposes.”