Hacked gov?t websites restored

The website of the Philippine Information Agency (PIA), the official information arm of the government is now restored after hacker “7z1” took it down yesterday.

Access to the site run by the Presidential Communications Operations Office was temporarily interrupted Sunday afternoon by an error message that showed ‘HACKED by 7z1’ and an image of the Chinese flag.

Bulacan’s provincial government website was also hacked by “”CopyRight 华夏小A & 409882525.qzone.qq.com ~ 2010″. Unscrupulous pages that contained messages related to the Manila hostage-taking were inserted to the site

The hacker, who claimed to be from China, demanded a ‘sincere’ apology from the Philippine government and ‘reasonable’ compensation for the victims of last Monday’s hostage taking drama that killed eight nationals from Hong Kong.

Communications Secretary Herminio Coloma ordered government agencies to further safeguard the security of all official websites. “We are alerting all government agencies to review and improve security of their Web sites in view of the hacking of the Philippine Information Agency Web site,” he said in a statement.

However, he said that the Presidential website – president. gov.ph and the official government website – gov.ph ‘remain secure.’

Coloma said the government is adopting best practices to lessen the vulnerability of official websites to hacking and other cybercrimes.