Several gov’t websites still down after hacking

MANILA, Philippines - Several Philippine government websites remained inaccessible yesterday, almost a week after a supposed cyber attack was launched against the country over the death of a Taiwanese fisherman allegedly shot by members of the Philippine Coast Guard on May 9.

A random check of several government sites showed the websites of the Office of the President (OP), the Department of Education (DepEd) and the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) were still inaccessible at 10 a.m. yesterday.

A suspension notice was also displayed when The STAR checked the website of the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) and the Philippine Marine Corps.

Meanwhile, most of the sites that have reportedly been subjected to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Saturday were still accessible.

These include the websites of the Senate, House of Representatives, Philippine National Police, Department of National Defense, and the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

The website of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) was also accessible, although it took some time for its homepage to load.

On Saturday, Comelec spokesman James Jimenez said there was no evidence of a DDoS attack and explained the inaccessibility of their website was due to the high volume of traffic.

The website of the Official Gazette, which earlier incorporated security checks to prevent DDoS attacks, was also accessible.

DDoS attacks are mounted to shut down an Internet site by flooding it with access requests and overload its server handling capabilities. Websites affected by successful DDoS attacks are inaccessible.

Rappler earlier reported the website of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) and the domain name service (DNS) page of gov.ph were also defaced by alleged Taiwanese hackers.

The DOST website became operational yesterday, but the DNS remains inaccessible. A cached copy of the site (dns.gov.ph) showed the message posted by the hackers.

“We are Anonymous. Philippine Coastguard killed Taiwanese unarmed fishermen is injustice and unforgivable. Philippine government protecting murders is unacceptable. You must apologize. Killers must be arrested immediately. Otherwise, we will not stop,” the message read.

Reports attributed the cyber attacks to Taiwan, which has called for an apology from the Philippine government over the death of a 65-year old fisherman following an incident over the waters claimed by both countries.

President Aquino already sent Manila Economic and Cultural Office (MECO) resident representative in Taipei Antonio Basilio to deliver the apology.

The Taiwanese government, however, did not accept the apology and called it “informal and insincere.”

Taiwan has since recalled its envoy to the Philippines and froze the hiring of Filipino workers.

Username, passwords

Hacktivist group Anonymous Taiwan on Monday posted on its Twitter account a link to a page supposedly containing log-in information of dozens of Philippine government websites.

Among those in the database were the log-in information of the websites of the OP, BIR, DepEd, and PCG.

The websites of the Social Security System, Commission on Higher Education, and other national agencies were also in the list.

A check on these sites, however, showed that they remain operational and accessible as of yesterday morning.