PLDT says technical glitch, not hacking caused diversion of government websites to theme park website

By Ronron
January 5, 2008

The service provider of the internet sites of three government agencies cleared on Saturday speculations that the diversion of their websites to the website of a popular theme park in the Philippines was due to hacking activities.

The spokesman of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone (PLDT) Company, Ramon Isberto, said in a phone interview that the diversion of the websites of the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) of the Philippine National Police (PNP), and the Information Technology and E-Commerce Council (ITECC) last Thursday “was more of a result of a technical glitch.”

“It wasn’t hacking,” Isberto told Manila Shimbun yesterday.

On Thursday afternoon, the websites of the DOJ, the CIDG, and ITECC were diverted to the website of Enchanted Kingdom, a popular theme park located in Sta. Rosa, Laguna.

After finding out, officials immediately ordered a restoration of the affected websites as they ordered an investigation on what caused the diversion.

Enchanted Kingdom has denied anything to do with the diversion, saying they were surprised themselves upon learning it from the news.

The DOJ had earlier downplayed the angle of hacking behind the incident, saying there could just have been cross-reference of the domains of the affected websites because they all share the same server, PLDT.

Isberto disclosed yesterday that the affected websites actually belong to one cluster.

“When we learned of the problem, our technical people immediately traced the source and they immediately re-configured the addresses and software. It was more of a configuration error,” Isberto said.

Isberto is not immediately aware, however, as to what caused the configuration error.

Nevertheless, he assured that even if the sites are still in the same cluster, “that incident won’t happen again.”

Isberto admitted that it was the first time he learned of such kind of diversion of the websites that are being maintained by PLDT./DMS