House website suffers cyberattack anew

MANILA, Philippines —  A government website suffered a cyberattack on Wednesday.

The House of Representatives official website faced a cyberattack in October last year, but the latest one marked a first in terms of the severity of the distributed denial of service (DDoS).

“Within just one hour, we recorded over 53 million attacks and by 4:36 p.m. (of March 13), the number had risen to over 480 million,” House Secretary General Reginald Velasco said in a statement.

“The objective of this cyberattack was clear: to make our digital platform unavailable to users. This tactic temporarily succeeded, but we quickly addressed the issue,” he added.

The main objective of the attack was to “disrupt the normal operation of our website by flooding it with an overwhelming amount of internet traffic, rendering the House’s website inaccessible to the public,” he noted.

House information and communications technology (ICT) experts promptly restored “several downtimes throughout the day,” he said.

“I want to assure everyone that no information related to the normal operations of the House was compromised. All institutional information remains secure, and no personal or institutional data was accessed or stolen,” he added.

Many similar cyberattacks “originated from various countries, including Indonesia, the United States, Colombia, India and the Russian Federation,” based on information from the House’s ICT director.

The accuracy of these locations could not be confirmed given the hackers’ potential use of virtual private networks, Velasco clarified.