Hackers bring down gov.ph sites on first day of cybercrime law

Hackers brazenly dared law enforcers to catch them on the day the controversial Cybercrime Prevention Act went into effect, as a number of government sites — including those of both houses of Congress — were inaccessible on Wednesday, demonstrating the hacker community's capability to easily disrupt or even cripple the government's Internet infrastructure. This developed as a hacker group offered netizens a tool to attack government sites in what could be the start of a cyberwar between tech-savvy protesters and a government that has paid scant attention to its own Internet security.

 

As of 4 a.m. Wednesday, the sites of the Philippine Senate (www.senate.gov.ph) and House of Representatives (www.congress.gov.ph) were inaccessible.

 

Shortly after 4 a.m., the site of the Official Gazette (www.gov.ph) was occasionally inaccessible.

 

Visitors to the Senate website received an error message that the connection to the site was interrupted, while those to the House of Representatives received an error message about a "bad gateway."

 

PrivateX, a group that claimed responsibility for earlier attacks on government sites, posted a URL on its Twitter account that leads to a site supposedly used for a denial of service (DoS) assault on government sites, a common form of aggression on the Internet.

 

The tool, which targeted the www.gov.ph site, could supposedly send 5,000 requests per second, with the message, "F*** the Cyber Crime Law."

 

Deputy presidential spokesperson Abigail Valte on Tuesday night claimed the www.gov.ph team "had to tweak some server settings to optimize site to accommodate the surge in traffic," when asked about the surge in traffic. Amid claims by some tweeps that the surge in traffic was in protest of the law, she said, "Interest in full text of RA10175 mostly driving traffic."

Protests continued against the controversial measure, whose provisions on online libel were seen by many as a threat to the right to freedom of expression.

 

Several groups had questioned the law before the Supreme Court, but the high court did not issue a temporary restraining order against it on Tuesday. — ELR/HS, GMA News