MANILA – The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) said Thursday it is confident it would identify the hackers behind a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on “gov.ph” sites.
NBI-Cybercrime Division chief Victor Lorenzo, speaking at a Laging Handa news briefing, said it is working closely with the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) to go after the malefactors.
“In 2012, there were massive attacks on government websites and we addressed those by arresting a very notorious hacker at that time kaya nag-subside ‘yung attacks (so the attacks subsided) on government websites. This is going to be our approach also,” Lorenzo said.
He noted there were also attacks last year, like the Office of the Solicitor General's online job application system (career.osg.gov.ph) that was defaced in December.
“May mga (There were) previous attacks in 2020 and we’ve been monitoring their activities and we are confident we will address the issue and could identify those behind these attacks,” Lorenzo said.
The DICT, he said, has identified sources of the attacks and would provide the NBI with details.
The NBI also said the hackers claimed they managed an “exfiltration of certain databases” but this has yet to be proven.
“They could easily claim that. Kaya lang minsan nagba-brag lang sila (But sometimes they say that to brag),” Lorenzo said. “One of the motives in hacking websites or defacing websites or doing these DDoS attacks is for bragging purposes or, of course, plain and simple hacktivism.”
He said claims of compromised databases should not be taken hook, line, and sinker.
“We have to validate that kasi maraming reports talaga pero wala naman pala (We have to validate those because there are reports that turn out to be false),” Lorenzo said. (PNA)
