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The website of the House of the Representatives was attacked a staggering 541.66 million times Wednesday, March 13 in an effort to render it inaccessible. 

Thus, bared House Secretary General Reginald Velasco in an press conference Thursday afternoon, March 14. 

He identified this type of online attack as Distributed Denial-of-Service or DDoS. It entails throwing an unusual surge in Internet traffic to a target website in order to overwhelm it 

Velasco said that as per the House's Information and Communication Technologies (ICTS) team, a staggering 53.72 million attacks were recorded between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. Wednesday. 

He said these "originat[ed] from Indonesia, the United States, Columbia, India, and the Russian Federation, which may not be accurate if they are using a VPN". 

"And at 2:52 pm yesterday, a whopping 487.93 million attacks were also recorded, from sources in Tunisia, Thailand and Greece, which again may not be accurate, which brings the total amount of attacks to 541.66 million," he said. 

These attacks resulted to the House website (www.congress.gov.ph) flashing a "Testing 123.." screen during a certain period Wednesday.  The website was already operating normally by Thursday. 

"The ICTS Team has assured us that they have blocked and managed all of these attacks through the Cloudflare service, displayed an 'under maintenance notice', restarted the servers and continued normal operations. It has also been reported to the DICT (Department of Information and Communications Technology)," Velasco said. 

"No further attacks have been observed since, and the ICTS team continues to monitor for unusual internet activity on the website," he added. 

"We commend the ICTS Team for its nimble and perceptive handling of the DDoS attacks on the website. The Congress website has been under attack in the past from hackers, and we are grateful for a competent team of IT professionals who vigilantly repel these attacks," he said. 

The House official called on the DICT to investigate the DDoS attacks and ascertain where they are really coming from, if they are local or foreign hackers or a collaboration of both. 

"We must know the reason for these attacks, is it for money or for political reasons as they may have been contracted to destabilize our institution for whatever purpose," he said.