MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) on Friday confirmed that a website they were using for development was defaced.
“The [DICT] confirms that a website defacement incident occurred involving a staging environment used in the development, testing, and validation of a website prior to its official deployment,” the agency said in a statement.
It added that the website affected was a “development and testing environment and was not the final version of the website intended for official public implementation.”
“It was being used to evaluate the website's functionality, configurations, and other components as part of the preparation for its eventual deployment,” the DICT said.
“Upon detection of the incident, DICT immediately initiated an assessment of the affected environment to establish the circumstances surrounding the unauthorized access and determine whether any security weaknesses may have been involved,” it added.
In a Facebook post, cybersecurity advocacy group Deep Web Konek early on Friday said that threat actor 4HMDOS4 claimed responsibility for the defacement.
“The defaced page displayed a message criticizing government spending, transparency, procurement, and the use of ‘safety’ as a justification for restrictions. The message also called for greater public oversight of DICT,” the group said.
