The official website of Police Community Relations Group (PCRG) of the Philippine National Police (PNP) was hacked Tuesday afternoon by well-known Philippine Cyber Army, the part of the online hacktivist group “Anonymous”.
The hacked police website was displaying a message that shows the website was hacked against the protest of Cybercrime Prevention Act 2012, which has been recently passed by the government of Philippine.
The PCA hackers are running an online operation “#OpPhilippines” against ”The Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012”, which according to hackers is an attempt to put a tap on freedom of speech and poses a serious threats to Internet freedom, the right to privacy and other essential civil liberties including the freedom of speech, expression, and the press.
PCA hackers left their deface page along with a message, the page was also displaying a message saying, “Hacked by M4N1L4 PR1D3, PHILIPPINE CYBER ARMY AND -=TheFamilyPride=-.”
According to the complete message left by the hackers’ army:
The Philippine Government has just passed a bill that effectively ends the Freedom of Expression in the Philippines. The Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 is the most notorious act ever witnessed in the cyber-history of the Philippines, and the language of the bill is cunningly designed to make you think it only applies to individuals who are deep in cyber-technology and doesn’t apply to everyone, but some part of the bill basically says it can imprison anyone who commits libel either by written messages, comments, blogs, or posts in sites such as Facebook, Twitter, or any other comment-spaces of other social media in the Internet.
New technologies give us new opportunities to connect with a lot of people not only in this country but all over the world. They can also provide us with a medium through which our political, public and even private views can have an immediate and direct impact on individuals, communities and even countries. It is just so disappointing that our government, in adopting our 80-year-old antiquated libel laws to the Cybercrime Law, again seems to have retarded our march with the rest of the world with respect to giving full force to the people’s freedom of expression. We ask for a revision of the said bill for the betterment of the Filipino denizens. Protect our Right to Freedom of Expression! No To CyberCRIME! This is a message to the Philippines. Expect us!
Links of hacked website:
Deface message:
The defaced page was also displaying official Facebook page link of hackers along with a link of their official forum.
The group urged the government to take the law back or at least revise it; otherwise there would be no other way but to hack and attack Philippines websites.
The Philippine Cyber Army is the same group that successfully hacked and defaced the official website of Agusan Del Sur, which is a province in Philippine.
At the time of writing this article, the website was not working and probably taken down by the administrator of the website, showing messages such as:
Index of /and Not Found
The requested URL /pc4~mp.htm was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
The PCRG-PNP is not the first website attacked by the hackers, since the beginning of September, several high-profile government-owned domains have been taken down by the Anonymous hackers and the hackers from PHA against the cyber-crime law.
