Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 11) — The National Bureau of Investigation said it would launch a crackdown on persons behind the hacking of the Philippine government’s main website.
NBI Cybercrime Division chief Victor Lorenzo on Thursday assured that the agency will arrest individuals involved in a distributed denial-of-service attack on the national government’s main portal www.gov.ph. The intention was to overwhelm the site with so much traffic that it would crash.
“There was a massive cyber-attack in 2012 on government websites and we addressed this by arresting a very notorious hacker…This will be our approach also,” Lorenzo said during a Palace briefing.
He added that the hackers remain unidentified as the Department of Information and Communications Technology is still “doing proper attribution.”
The NBI said it was just waiting for relevant information from the DICT before it could start a formal investigation.
On Wednesday, the site was brought down by a group claiming to have launched a “political cyber-attack” after the controversial Calabarzon crackdown on Sunday that left nine activists dead.
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CNN Philippines attempted to access the site at 5:53 p.m., but to no avail. It only showed “This site can’t be reached” or “Bad Gateway” on the website page.
The NBI Cybercrime Division chief however said any claims that data files were stolen from government sites need to be validated first.
“There were claims na meron silang exfiltration of certain databases, but this has yet to be proven. They could easily say that. Minsan nagba-brag lang sila (sometimes they are just bragging). One of the motives in hacking, defacing websites is for bragging purposes or plain and simple, hacktivism,” he added.
