Hacktivists cripple PRO-6, key W. Visayas police sites

By Jennifer P. Rendon

Hacktivists have crippled the websites of Police Regional Office 6 (PRO-6) and several provincial and city police offices in Western Visayas following a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on November 6.

Major Lailyn Sencil, PRO-6 spokesperson, said the websites of PRO-6, Iloilo City Police Office (ICPO), Iloilo Police Provincial Office (IPPO), Aklan PPO, Antique PPO, Capiz PPO, and Guimaras IPPO were inaccessible.

However, she assured the public that no sensitive data was lost during the cyberattack.

On Thursday, Facebook page Klammer posted that the group HappyGoLuckyPH was behind the cyber breach.

The post stated, “In response to the Philippine National Police and Mr. Aguda, this is our contribution for November 5th. This isn’t just about knocking them offline for hours — this will last forever if they don’t migrate their backends xD. We are HappyGoLuckyPH, and we’re just underground ;)”

The group claimed that 68 official Philippine National Police (PNP) websites were affected.

Major Laurence Anthony Flaminiano, assistant chief of the PNP Regional Information Technology Office (RITO) 6, confirmed the attack was a DDoS — a cyber assault in which website servers are overwhelmed by massive traffic from multiple sources, often through a botnet of compromised devices, making the sites slow or inaccessible to legitimate users.

Flaminiano said the current attack did not appear to be intended for data theft.

It was learned that the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) hosts the web services of the PNP and other government agencies.

As of press time, Flaminiano said the PRO-6 website could already be accessed.

“But we’re still expecting downtime with our servers,” he added.

Flaminiano said they are coordinating with DICT Region 6 to implement proactive measures to secure web administrator accounts and prevent future hacking attempts.