Gordon's website still down after repeated cyber-attacks

Senator Richard J. Gordon's official website has been hit again by a coordinated online attack for two consecutive days now.

Myke Cruz, information technology officer of Gordon's office, reported the latest attack as the Senate resumed its probe into alleged anomalous procurement contracts the government has entered with Pharmally Pharmaceutical Corporation.

"In our opinion, the timing of the outage was purposely made just as the Blue Ribbon panel was set to resume its public hearing on the anomalous contracts with Pharmally Pharmaceutical, the first attack being last Oct. 4," he said.

According to him, it was another case of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, usually requested through the dark web by malicious parties, causing the shutdown of web services from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m on Oct. 19.

Moreover, another attack commenced at 8 a.m. today, and is still down as of press time. The website, dickgordon.ph, started to have around four million requests per second at 8 a.m., and peaked at noon, when about 72 million requests pounded the site.

Number of unique visitors also increased exponentially to a total of 78 million when the attack ceased at 3 p.m. Majority of the bots requesting access to the website in last Tuesday's attack came from the United States, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, Germany, and TOR browsers.

However, today's attack was of local origin, with IP addresses of the perpetrators located in Metro Manila, Taguig, Rizal, Paranaque, Nueva Ecija, as well as the cities of General Santos, Cotabato, Cagayan de Oro, Davao, Dumaguete, and Magugpo town in Davao del Norte.

The botnet owner, the brains behind the attack, usually develops malware distributed through email or website attachments. Millions of computer owners unknowingly host the malware, which the attacker adds to the botnet to simultaneously make requests to the website.

Due to the number of high simultaneous requests per second, it may cause the server to reach its computing resource, creating a bottleneck.

In his opening speech at the resumption of the Senate investigation last Oct. 19, Gordon has called out "trolls" for trooping his social media pages, leaving choreographed remarks against him.

"Shout-out na rin po sa mga 'trolls' na nanonood at nagre-review ng mga script nila. Alam po naming hanapbuhay ninyo iyan at ginagawa nyo po iyan para kumita para [sa] inyong mga mahal sa buhay, pero sana po ay magbagong buhay na po kayo," he said.

The trolls have parroted Mr. Duterte's unfounded accusations against Gordon through similar comments and videos taken out of context regarding previously settled issues in the Philippine Red Cross and Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority.

Numerous sectors, mostly from the medical, academe, and business sectors, called on Mr. Duterte to revoke its outstanding directive barring his officials and employees to attend and cooperate with the ongoing Senate inquiry.

Over 300 doctors, including five former Health secretaries signed a manifesto of support calling for transparency and accountability on the issue of alleged government misuse of COVID-19 pandemic funds.

"We thank the overwhelming support to our investigation that has led to discovery of more irregularities. No website attack will deter our efforts to run after those who engineered and perpetrated this scam," said Gordon.