THE Land Transportation Office (LTO) pressed a foreign-based company to surrender the main transport data system as it became the property of the Philippine government upon the expiration of the contract.
In Wednesday’s press conference, LTO chief Markus Lacanilalo and Executive Director Martin Ontog cited the continued failure of German technology firm Dermalog Identification Systems GmbH to turn over the system, including its source code, encryption keys, administrative access, and the complete database of vehicle registrations and driver's licenses. Failure to do so puts the data of millions of Filipino motorists at risk.
Top LTO officials lamented that the agency could not fully secure the driver's license and vehicle registration data of millions of Filipinos because the foreign firm that built its main database system continues to withhold the access needed to protect it.
Ontog cited a complaint filed by a concerned group and individuals against the tech firm, which remains unacted on by the Office of the Ombudsman, and a pending resolution from the Commission on Audit that was expected to resolve Dermalog's financial claims.
”It (Dermalog) said that it is ready to turn over the main database system once the government gives its back payments, but that is not our (LTO) position,” Ontog said.
Ontog said the agency's investigation into a nationwide outage of the Land Transportation Management System (LTMS) on June 3 uncovered login activity tied to a vendor-linked account dated June 2, 2026 — a few weeks after the supplier's maintenance contract had lapsed on May 13.
Firewall logs also showed repeated connection attempts through a virtual private network (VPN) account geolocated to a telecom connection within Metro Manila, Ontog said.
When LTO raised the findings with the Department of Information and Communications Technology's cybersecurity bureau, it confirmed the former supplier was, at that time, still managing the system's firewall, just as LTO's own access to its back-end database remained query-level only, meaning the agency could only view the data and could not administer it.
LTO has since disabled the accounts it identified, and its management information division has formally recommended replacing the firewall entirely so that the agency, not the vendor, controls it.
Citing several outages in seven weeks, the LTO officials noted the first and most severe outage, which knocked the system fully offline nationwide, hit one day after a cease-and-desist order from the Office of the Ombudsman directed LTO to stop using its separate, zero-cost backup platform, the same platform that has run and served LTO since 2003 under a different, longer-serving contractor.
He argued that LTO cannot be held responsible for defending a system it has been denied the means to control “while the vendor holding that control has no active contract obligating it to do so.”
Both Lacanilao and Ontog agreed that the possible blacklisting of Dermalog and its joint venture partners will depend on whether government proceedings establish that the company violated its contract, as the agency continues to push for access to the LTMS’ source code.
"If it is established that they failed to comply with their contractual obligations or failed to deliver required components of the system, they may be blacklisted from participating in future government bidding," Ontog said.
He said several LTMS deliverables remain incomplete or are not fully functional.
Among them are the system for processing diplomatic license plates and the inability to implement mandatory medical examination requirements for holders of five-year and 10-year driver's licenses.
Ontog said the LTO cannot introduce such changes without access to the system's source code.
He added that while the LTMS is operational in many areas, the agency still lacks control over the database and source code needed to modify the system to meet changing operational requirements.
He also clarified that blacklisting Dermalog would not mean abandoning the LTMS since the government already owns the system.
