Ingat sa hackers! Zarate warns vs troll attacks on admin critics

By Billy Begas

House Deputy Minority leader and Bayan Muna Rep. Carlos Isagani Zarate on Sunday called on critics of the administration to be more vigilant against troll and hacking attacks on their websites, apps and even Facebook pages.

Zarate also called for an independent investigation on these attacks “because it would just be covered up or swept under the rug by the real perpetrators, so we must continue to be vigilant for similar or other online attacks.”

He said that just recently hackers or trolls ‘attacked’ Manila’s vaccination registration website 133 times the night before thousands trooped to vaccination sites in the capital city.

Last June the registration app of the opposition coalition 1Sambayan was hacked. Also in the same month, media outlets Altermidya and Bulatlat.com were subjected to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that were traced to the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) as the perpetrators.

Zarate said the bayanmuna.com.ph website had been under attack by trolls or hackers since early June up till the State of the Nation Address (SONA) in July 26. At first they just launched 2-day attacks, stop, then launch another 2-day attacks. It escalated into a full scale attack from June 24 to July 9, then again intensified in the run up to the SONA.

“The type of attack the hackers used is HTTP flooding which is similar to the DDoS attack used by the AFP against Bulatlat and Altermidya. In this type of attack they would send overwhelmingly numerous requests to access your website that it would crash. In other words ‘nadumog’ ang Bayan Muna website like what happened to the Manila Covax registration website,” Zarate said.

Zarate said there seems to be a coordinated effort to attack the websites of groups and figures that expose the ineptness of the Duterte administration.

“We cannot also blame people to think that the people behind the attacks are one and the same group,” he added.

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Source: Latest Politics News Today (Politics.com.ph)