'It was not a hacking incident'--PLDT

By Erwin Oliva - INQUIRER.net


MANILA, Philippines -- There was no hacking incident, a spokesperson of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) told INQUIRER.net, as it reacted to news of several government websites it hosted being redirected to a website of a Philippine theme park.

“It was not a hacking incident. We had problems with the software managing these websites,” said Ramon Isberto, spokesperson of PLDT, as he explained how the website of the Department of Justice (DoJ), and dormant websites of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group of the Philippine National Police (CIDG-PNP), the National Bureau of Investigation, and the Information Technology and E-commerce Council -- now a defunct body -- were found to be redirected to the official site of the Enchanted Kingdom theme park in Laguna.

Isberto said that the DoJ website was part of a cluster of websites whose management software had gone bad.

“The DoJ website was in the same cluster as the Enchanted Kingdom website. There were problems in the configuration [of the system hosting these websites]," the PLDT spokesperson added.

Isberto said the other government websites are also part of the same cluster of websites.

PLDT has also given the DoJ a written explanation of what happened.

Earlier, an Internet security expert from TrendLabs Philippines and a director of the Philippine Computer Emergency Response Team agreed that the recent redirection of at least three government websites to the Enchanted Kingdom website could be due to a “network setup problem.”

As of Friday, the ITECC website was restored, while the PNP website has been taken down.

Government websites affected by the redirection were www.itecc.gov.ph, which is an old website of the defunct ITECC; the www.cidg.pnp.gov.ph, a dormant address of the Philippine National Police (PNP), and the www.doj.gov.ph, which was fixed immediately. All government websites were redirected to the official website of the Enchanted Kingdom, a popular theme park located in Sta. Rosa, Laguna.

The Enchanted Kingdom website is hosted by Infocom Technologies, a local Internet service provider owned by the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. The "itecc.gov.ph" domain is hosted by Infocom Technologies, a local Internet service provider owned by PLDT, a check on host of the domain name "itecc.gov.ph " revealed.

Infocom Technologies also appeared as host of the DoJ and the NBI websites.