THE House of Representatives’ yesterday said its IT team was able to successfully fight off an overwhelming level of cyberattack last Wednesday, which temporarily rendered its website inaccessible to the public.
The website was back online yesterday.
House Secretary General Reginald Velasco said the House’s website, www.congress.gov.ph, was subjected to a staggering 541.66 million attacks, indicating what industry experts call a distributed denial-of-service or DDoS.
“A staggering 53.72 million attacks were recorded between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. yesterday (Wednesday) originating from Indonesia, the United States, Columbia, India, and the Russian Federation, which may not be accurate if they are using a VPN,” Velasco told a press briefing. “And at 2:52 p.m. yesterday (Wednesday), a whopping 487.93 million attacks were also recorded, from sources in Tunisia, Thailand and Greece, which again may not be accurate, which brings the total amount of attacks to 541.66 million.”
The latest cyberattack came almost five months after the October 15 hacking incident last year by a group calling itself “3MUSKETEERZ,” who defaced the House’s website with a “YOU’VE BEEN HACKED” and troll face comic meme posted on the left side of the landing page.
Velasco said the House’s Information and Communication Technology Service (ICTS) team has assured the leadership “that they have blocked and managed all of these attacks through the Cloudflare service, displayed an ‘under maintenance notice,’ restarted the servers and continued normal operations.”
“We assure the people that the attacks have been repelled and put under control, and no further malicious activity on the website has been recorded,” he said.
Velasco said the incident has been reported to the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), adding that no further attacks have been observed since, as the ICTS team continues to monitor for unusual internet activity on the website.
