Sen. Richard Gordon (Screen grab/Senate PRIB)
MANILA, Philippines — Sen. Richard Gordon, who is leading an investigation of alleged irregular procurement contracts for pandemic supplies, on Wednesday said his official website came under a coordinated online attack on Oct. 4, shutting it down for six hours.
It was the latest in a series of actions targeting the Senate blue ribbon panel chair, who has been in President Rodrigo Duterte’s crosshairs since he launched an inquiry into the use of the government’s pandemic response funds in August.
“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,” Gordon’s office said in a statement.
The Senate’s own website was shut down on Wednesday due to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack originating from multiple countries, according to its Electronic Data Processing-Management Information System Bureau (EDP-MIS).
Overwhelming traffic
The attack was observed before noon. The website was still not accessible as of 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday.
“A DDoS attack is an attempt to make an online service or website unavailable by overwhelming it with internet traffic from multiple sources. The official website of Senator Gordon also fell victim to a DDoS attack last Oct. 4,” the EDP-MIS said.
A day before the attack, Gordon said he was the target of an “online demolition job” by alleged pro-administration social media pages in the wake of the President’s sustained verbal assaults against him.
The senator said the sudden flurry of “fake news and fake clickbait headlines” were intended to deflect attention from the corruption issues plaguing the Duterte administration, including the scandal involving Pharmally Pharmaceutical Corp. and former presidential economic adviser Michael Yang.
Questioned spending
Gordon’s committee has angered Mr. Duterte for looking into alleged irregularities in the government’s spending of pandemic response funds, including the P42 billion transferred by the Department of Health to the Procurement Service of the Department of Budget and Management to purchase medical supplies.
The lion’s share of the money, P11.5 billion, went to procurement contracts bagged by Pharmally, whose executives pointed to Yang as a guarantor and lender to their company which had a paid-up capital of only P625,000 in 2019 and zero income when the pandemic struck last year.
Myke Cruz, Gordon’s information technology officer, said a DDoS attack, usually patched through the dark web in exchange for a high price, caused the 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. shutdown of the senator’s website.
Administrators of dickgordon.ph were able to resolve the problem by barring entry of traffic from outside the Philippines at around 1 p.m. The foreign-led attack persisted until 3:04 p.m.
Cruz said the huge traffic “requests” to Gordon’s website primarily came from China, the United States, Ukraine, and several Southeast Asian countries.