DOTC website
MANILA, Philippines – The website of the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) has been restored after it was vandalized by a hacker said to be from Turkey.
“The DOTC has restored back online its website, a few hours after the site was vandalized by an entity which identifies itself as ‘Aksuvari Gandalf,’ purportedly from Turkey,” DOTC spokesperson Nic Conti said in a statement Monday.
“The DOTC Management Information System (MIS) Office quickly published the original content of dotc.gov.ph using the most recent back-up it had of the website,” Conti said.
“The DOTC MIS and its hosting provider conduct regular back-ups of the website so we are prepared for cases of vandalism such as this,” he added.
None of the files uploaded on the website have been deleted or corrupted and website was only defaced, Conti said.
“Our MIS team is currently retracing the activities in our logs to determine how the vandalism took place. We are now looking for the vulnerabilities so we can plug whatever gap to prevent this from happening again,” he said.
Conti assured that none of the other online systems and operations of the DOTC were interrupted.
He also added that the incident was not related to the anti-Cybercrime law hackings “being waged by alleged Filipino ‘hacktivists’ such as the group Anonymous Philippines.”
In the past weeks, several government websites have been hacked by various groups protesting the recently passed Cybercrime Prevention Law, said to be violative of the people’s right to freedom of speech over the internet.