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Hackers have defaced and possibly taken down a Philippine government website after the country has faced a wave of cyber attacks in recent months.
The incident happened over the weekend when a hacking group calling itself 3MUSKETEERZ added a trollface image – a popular meme among certain online communities – with the text “You’ve been hacked, you’ve been hacked, have a nice day”.
The group then added, “Happy April Fullz Kahit October palang! Fix your Website,” according to Philippine news site INQUIRER.net.
The latter translates as “even though it’s October” – hackers have a weird sense of humour.
Within minutes, the site was down entirely, either as a result of the hack itself or taken down by the Philippine government as a part of remediating the hack. Regardless, the website remains down as of the time of writing.
Throughout October, the DDOS-V2 gang has been targeting Philippine websites, including Bet88 Philippines and the San Sebastian College, while both a medical clinic and a local government website have been struck by data breaches.
The Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth) was also affected by a data breach in September, affecting the personal data of its employees, including names and addresses, PhilHealth ID numbers, and phone numbers.
The group behind this most recent incident, 3MUSKETEERZ, appears to be either relatively new or relatively obscure, as there is no record of it on a number of threat intelligence sites, nor does it appear to have a Telegram channel.
However, its use of Filipino in its defacement suggests it is a local group.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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