MANILA – The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) on Monday confirmed that the website of the House of Representatives (HOR) has been hacked and is investigating the incident.
In a statement, the DICT said the cybersecurity incident occurred on Sunday and is being investigated by the DICT’s Philippine National Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-PH).
“The HOR immediately put the website offline to prevent further unauthorized access and reported the incident to the DICT,” it said.
To date, the DICT said CERT-PH is looking into whether sensitive data has been accessed by the threat actor.
“Recommendations were likewise provided to the HOR IT team to prevent future security breaches on their website,” it added.
The DICT assured the public that the security vulnerabilities of the HOR website would be fixed and would return online shortly.
Once CERT-PH completes its investigation, it said the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) and law enforcement agencies will conduct “threat actor attribution and case build-up” to bring the perpetrators to justice.
“The DICT reaffirms its commitment to be an active partner of government agencies as they fulfill the primary responsibility of safeguarding their own ICT systems and infrastructure against cyber threats,” it said.
On Sunday, the HOR website, congress.gov.ph, home page showed an image of a meme captioned “you’ve been hacked” uploaded by a person or group who called themselves 3musketeerz.
As of posting time, the website remains down. (PNA)
