House website subjected to 541.66M cyberattacks on March 13 – exec

House Secretary General Reginald Velasco says on Thursday, March 14, 2024, that the chamber’s website was attacked 541.66 million times on Wednesday. INQUIRER FILES

MANILA, Philippines — The website of the House of Representatives saw an overwhelming 541.66 million cyberattacks on March 13, the chamber’s secretary general reported Thursday.

House Secretary General Reginald Velasco said their tech team reported an unusual surge in internet traffic on the lower chamber’s website on Wednesday, indicating “a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, which aims to overwhelm target websites and render them inaccessible.”

“A staggering 53.72 million attacks were recorded between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. yesterday (Wednesday) originating from Indonesia, the United States, Columbia, India, and the Russian Federation, which may not be accurate if they are using a VPN (virtual private network),” Velasco pointed out in a statement.

“And at 2:52 p.m. yesterday (Wednesday), a whopping 487.93 million attacks were also recorded, from sources in Tunisia, Thailand, and Greece, which again may not be accurate – which brings the total amount of attacks to 541.66 million,” he added.

READ: Hackers deface website of House of Representatives

Velasco admitted that this may seem alarming. However, he said the House’s cybersecurity team gave assurance that they managed to block the attacks using various ways such as “Cloudflare service, displayed an ‘under maintenance notice,’ restarted the servers, and continued normal operations.”

READ: 1 in 3 Filipinos hit by cyberthreats hidden in ‘thumb drives’

“No further attacks have been observed since, and the ICTS Team continues to monitor for unusual internet activity on the website,” he said.

Velasco said Wednesday’s cyberattack on the House’s official website has been reported to the Department of Information and Communications Technology.

In October 2023, hackers defaced the House website by a group calling itself “3MUSKETEERZ.”

A troll face meme with the phrases “you’ve been hacked” and “have a nice day” was first published on the website. Below the troll’s face is the message, “Happy April Fullz Kahit October palang! Fix your Website.”

A few minutes later, the website of the House of Representatives became inaccessible.