Senator Richard Gordon's official website has fallen victim to a coordinated online attack, causing the site to shut down for several hours, his office disclosed on Wednesday, Oct. 6.
Myke Cruz, information technology officer of Gordon’s office, made the report amid the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee's investigation into the alleged anomalous COVID-19 procurement deals by the government.
Gordon, chairs the blue ribbon panel, which is now probing the questionable transaction between the Department of Budget and Management's Procurement Services (DBM-PS) and Pharmally Pharmaceutical Corp.
According to Cruz, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, usually patched through the dark web by nefarious individuals in exchange for a high price, was the cause of the web services shutdown last Oct. 4, from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m.
He said online administrators of dickgordon.ph were able to contain the problem by barring entry of traffic from outside the Philippines at around 1 p.m., but the foreign-led attack persisted until 3:04 p.m.
He said past instances have linked DDoS attacks to destabilizing the online presence of an opposing party.
Cruz pointed out the traffic requests to Gordon's website primarily came from China, the United States, Ukraine, and other Southeast Asian countries.
This caused the usual bandwidth traffic to rise dramatically from less than 100MB to almost 1.8GB within an hour’s span.
“We view such service outage or disruption as a serious concern as its timing comes when the Senate Blue Ribbon panel is investigating alleged irregularities in government procurement for COVID-19 supplies and equipment,” Cruz said.
Earlier, Gordon warned the public to be more discriminate about the online disinformation and fake news being propagated by pro-administration pages on Facebook and Google (YouTube) which are meant to discredit him and other senators.