University of the Philippines hits hacking of its website

The University of the Philippines has denounced last week’s defacing of its website but assured the public that no sensitive data was damaged or  compromised.

In a statement, the state university on Monday apologized to the public for the inaccessibility of the UP System website on Friday.

The cyber attack, which left a map of China on the main page with the words “We are from China! Huangyan Island is ours!,” was launched amid the ongoing standoff over the Panatag Shoal between the Philippines and China.

In a statement, UP president Alfredo Pascual said the cyber attack deprived the public of vital information especially related to the recent UP commencement exercises.

But he assured that no private data such as constituents’ data from the UP Webmail, computerized registration system, etc. were compromised.

Various UP departments worked until Saturday to restore the website.

According to a report by the University Computer Center, the hacker struck at 2:20 a.m. and uploaded the “unwarranted content.”

The UCC team discovered the hacking at 4:50 a.m. and immediately acted by closing all access to the web server.

“The UCC has already made adjustments to the restored site to prevent a similar incident from happening again, details of which we opt not to divulge for security reasons,” Pascual said.

The top UP official said they were able to trace the IP address of the hacker to a specific country but he declined to identify it.

Pascual explained that the IP address might have been masked to appear as if someone was working from that location, or someone compromised a machine to deface the website.

He also cited news reports of hackers claiming to be from the Philippines who defaced the websites of several institutions in China.

The actions were supposedly in retaliation for the hacking of the UP System website.

Pascual appealed to the public to “avoid jumping to conclusions and taking actions that could further inflame the people’s sentiments.”

“Hacking selected websites in the suspected country of the hacker or hackers does not objectively articulate any political issue and only subjectively fulfills a personal desire to ‘get even,’” he said.

He added that hacking other websites achieved nothing but unproductive counter-actions.