MANILA, Philippines — The official website of the House of Representatives was breached on Sunday merely a week after two other government agencies reported large-scale cyberattacks.
House Secretary General Reginald Velasco said in a statement that the House website experienced “unauthorized access” early Sunday.
The public has been advised to be cautious of potentially fraudulent emails or communications that claim to be from the House of Representatives.
The lower chamber’s official website stores different information on legislative measures and information on its members, among others.
On Sunday, the website was defaced with an image of a "trollface" and an entity calling itself “3MUSKETEERZ” taking responsibility for the act.
Parts of the website that typically hosted links to press releases or recordings of House panel meetings were replaced with unrelated text.
The House has since rendered its website temporarily inaccessible after detecting the hacking incident.
Velasco said that the House has taken steps to address the matter and has begun coordinating with the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) and law enforcement agencies to probe the incident.
“While we work to restore the website fully, we ask for patience and understanding,” Velasco said.
“We are committed to ensuring the security and integrity of our digital platforms, and we will implement additional measures to prevent such incidents in the future,” Velasco added.
LOOK: The website of the House of Representatives appears to have been hacked. | via @chicristina_ pic.twitter.com/Y73K8KoLv2
— Philstar.com (@PhilstarNews) October 15, 2023
Both PhilHealth and the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) reported cyberattacks last week, with the state health insurer admitting that it had experienced a data leak involving personal information.
PSA, meanwhile, said that initial evaluation found the breach to be limited only to data collected by its Community-Based Monitoring System.