Yesterday afternoon, The National Privacy Commission (NPC) published a statement saying their website will be temporarily down due to an IT security incident.
The site, www.privacy.gov.ph, was given a black background, music, and a message in red text that read: "Hacked by XLEGION."
As of this time it is really unclear on how the hacker was able to hack the Website. The site and servers are regularly updated and patched, this could mean that the hacker hacked the website through zero-day vulnerability on Wordpress Themes or Plugins or perhaps the hacker was able to get working credentials with administrative privileges.
Hackers commonly deface websites to protest social and political injustice around the globe, spreading their message to a wider audience.
Earlier this month, over 700,000 websites were affected by Zero-Day Vulnerability in Wordpress File Manager Plugin.
Web defacement is typically done by hackers who break into a web server and replace the hosted website with one of their own. Using techniques such as Remote Code Execution, SQL Injection, Cross Site Scripting etc. Common targets of defacement are religious websites, government websites, bank websites and corporate websites.
How can enterprises protect their sites?
- Use Web Application Firewall (WAF) to filter, monitor, and block malicious traffic.
- Organizations must implement secure coding standards on all their sites.
- Regularly scan web applications for vulnerabilities.
- Update, update, update.
- Regularly update everything you can. The plug-ins, themes, and core. If possible, turn on automatic updates!
- Don’t install too many plug-ins, delete everything that is inactive and while selecting the necessary, make sure they are trusted.
- Keep backups! Always!