It seems that we could not get a break from these hacking incidents, as the website of the House of Representatives is the latest victim. The hackers defaced the website on Sunday (October 15), where they inserted a meme indicating that the House of Representatives has been compromised. Aside from the defaced home page, hackers also altered the press releases and committee schedules as well.

The House of Representatives, through the office of House Secretary General Reginald Velasco, has issued this statement on the hacking incident:

We wish to inform the public that the official website of the House of Representatives experienced unauthorized access earlier today. Immediate steps have been taken to address the issue, and we are working closely with the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) and law enforcement agencies concerned to investigate the matter.

While we work to restore the website fully, we ask for patience and understanding. We are committed to ensure the security and integrity of our digital platforms, and we will implement additional measures to prevent such incidents in the future.

For the moment, we advise the public to be cautious of any suspicious emails or communications that claim to be from the House of Representatives.

We will keep the public updated as more information becomes available.

This incident is the fifth time a government agency has been affected by cybersecurity issues. The biggest data breach was with PhilHealth, where hackers exposed over 600GB worth of data that contained sensitive information from PhilHealth members. This prompted the National Privacy Commission to launch a portal for PhilHealth members to check if their data was part of the massive data breach.

Aside from PhilHealth, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) also suffered from a data breach, where the government agency claimed that only its Community-Based Monitoring System (CMBS) was affected by the hacking incident.

Aside from PhilHealth, PSA, and Congress, the DICT also confirmed that the systems of both DOST and PNP were hacked as well. Based on DICT’s findings, some information from DOST experts was exposed by hackers after infiltrating the agency’s OneExpert portal, while the data exposed from PNP’s system were allegedly old files that hackers were trying to hype up.