Cyber attackers still targeting Senate's official website
MANILA, Philippines — The Senate's official website was knocked offline again Friday by ongoing cyberattacks that began two days prior.
This comes amid warnings from the staff of Sen. Richard Gordon, whose site was also shut down by cyberattackers on Monday, that the effort may be connected to the hearings on the government's anomalous deals with Pharmally Pharmaceutical Corp. that he leads as blue ribbon chairman.
The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack — perpetrated to disrupt a website or network's usual online activities by flooding it with traffic requests — was first confirmed by Senate staff on Wednesday. The site was offline from 11:30 a.m. to 7:38 p.m. that day.
The Senate's Electronic Data Processing-Management and Information System (EPD-MIS) bureau said attacks persisted on Thursday but were successfully kept at bay by blocking access from other countries.
Both Gordon's staff and EPD-MIS have now said that most of the attacks were coming from abroad.
Meanwhile, the DDoS attack on Gordon's site caused it to shut down from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Monday.
Gordon’s information technology officer Myke Cruz said in a statement released two days later that the majority of traffic requests to Gordon's website came from China, the United States, Ukraine, and other Southeast Asian nations.
Administrators were able to contain the problem by barring entry of traffic from outside the Philippines at around 1 p.m., but the foreign-led attack persisted until 3:04 p.m.
"We view such service outage or disruption as a serious concern as its timing comes when the Senate blue ribbon panel is investigating alleged irregularities in government procurement for COVID-19 supplies and equipment," Cruz said. — Bella Perez-Rubio
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