President of Philippines Official Website Hacked By Anonymous in Protest of "Sabah Issue"
After remaining silent for a certain period, the infamous hacker collective group Anonymous strikes again. As you all might know that normally this group targets high profile websites like government organization, federal authorities, defense, ministry and other giant organization. This time also the same strategy get repeated, as the hacker group targeted the official website of the President of Philippines. During this cyber attack the hacker group has breached the security system and managed to get access in side the website, and as expected they defaced the index page. In the news section of the website the hacker group calling them selves "Anonymous Philippines"; affiliated to one of the worlds most dangerous and largest hackers community going by the name "Anonymous"; left message for the President Benigno Aquino III. From the message left by the hacker, we came to know that the hacking was a part of protest against the Aquino administration’s mishandling of the crisis in "Sabah issue"
Message of Anonymous Philippines:-
“Greetings, President Aquino! We have watched how you signed into law a bill that endangers and tramples upon the netizens’ freedom of speech and expression. Now, we are silent witnesses as to how you are mishandling the Sabah issue. We did not engage the Malaysian hackers who invaded our cyberspace since we expected you to appropriately and judiciously act on the same, but you failed us.
“You did nothing while our fellow brothers are being butchered by the Malaysian forces, and while our women and children become subject of human rights abuses. If you can’t act on the issue as the Philippine President, at least do something as a fellow Filipino. We are watching.”
As soon as this hack get spotted, the Philippine government took immediate step while closing the backdoor and removing the deface page. After an hour of maintenance the website get restored and came back in proper manner. Later in-front of press the Philippine government acknowledged the issue. In the official statement the Communications Secretary of Philippine Sonny Coloma said -“At around 1:30 a.m. today, we detected a breach when an errant sentence critical of the government on the Sabah issue was found to have been inserted in one of the news items within the website.” Coloma did assure the public that the site will be up and running “in a few hours.”
“We expect to resume public display of the President's website in a few hours after needed protection measures have been put in place,” Coloma said, adding that the site was not compromised in any other way. “No further intrusions were made as the internal security protocols were activated,” he said.
While covering the hack of President site, we must give you reminder that, this hack is not the first one, earlier half dozen of major government website of Philippine was targeted by the same hacker group, even in this year the official website of Senator Vicente C. Sotto III get hacked and defaced by Anonymous Philippines for the protest of "Cybercrime Prevention Act"
