Thursday, September 2, 2010

Government Sites Hacked To Demand Apology and Compensation for Hostage Drama

Last Sunday, the website of the Philippine Information Agency (PIA), the official information arm of the government was hacked.

Access to the site run by the Presidential Communications Operations Office was temporarily interrupted an error message that showed ‘HACKED by 7z1’ and an image of the Chinese flag. Bulacan’s provincial government website was also hacked by “”CopyRight 华夏小A & 409882525.qzone.qq.com ~ 2010″. Unscrupulous pages that contained messages related to the Manila hostage-taking were inserted to the site. The hacker demanded a ‘sincere’ apology from the Philippine government and ‘reasonable’ compensation for the victims of last Monday’s hostage taking drama that killed eight nationals from Hong Kong.

Communications Secretary Herminio Coloma ordered government agencies to further safeguard the security of all official websites. “We are alerting all government agencies to review and improve security of their Web sites in view of the hacking of the Philippine Information Agency Web site,” he said in a statement. However, he said that the Presidential website – president. gov.ph and the official government website – gov.ph ‘remain secure.’

Since the hostage taking drama, I have been seeing all sorts of blog posts, news and articles in the net which are aimed against our country. I tried to avoid reading those depressing articles but they were everywhere in the internet so I just read them anyway. We could not blame others for all the hate but I just wish it would stop sooner.

Hacking government sites is so uncalled for. There are so many ways to propagate the message. I don’t think they should have gone that far to emphasize a point which is so obvious. The Philippine government indeed has a lot to do; hence, if they would like the government to do what it has to, perhaps they should stop making unnecessary fuss which could further delay government action. The government should be focusing on how to make reparations and should not be bothered by those sorts of distractions.


--Gen S. (5)

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