By Junex Doronio
MANILA — It pays to be “alisto” (alert) as the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) foiled the hackers believed to be operating in China who breached the email systems and internal websites of several government agencies.
On Saturday, DICT Undersecretary for Cybersecurity Jeff Ian Dy revealed that the department, in cooperation with tech giant Google, detected and mitigated the situation from further escalation by shutting down the access of hackers.
“So ang target niya ay government emails and websites (So the targets are government emails and websites),” Dy said at the Saturday News Forum in Quezon City.
He noted that the hackers targeted those with “gov.ph” domains.
The email domains targeted by hackers were:
cabsec.gov.ph
coastguard.gov.ph
cpbrd.congress.gov.ph
dict.gov.ph
doj.gov.ph
ncws.gov.ph
Dy further said private domains were also targeted, including www.bongbongmarcos.com (pbbm.com.ph) —the private website of President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.
He bared the cyber-attack, which he described as “academically perfect,” was probably done by one of the three notorious hacking groups: Lonely Island, Meander, and Panda.
“These are believed to be advanced threat groups that operate within the ambit of Chinese territories,” Dy said.
It can be recalled that late last year, several government websites were attacked, such as the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth) which was hit by a ransomware attack that resulted in the leak of its data.
Also hacked were the websites of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), the Philippine National Police (PNP), and the Department of Science and Technology (DOST).
(el Amigo/MNM)
