Noah’s website survives great flood of cyberattacks

LIKE the biblical Noah who rode out the Great Flood, this Noah also emerged unscathed.

Attempts to hack the Project Noah website were repulsed by Department of Science and Technology (DOST) engineers and programmers on Thursday, according to project head Mahar Lagmay.

Project Noah, which only recently became operational, monitors weather patterns, measures rainfall and serves as a warning system, among other things.

The Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa) is using it to monitor Tropical Storm “Marce” which is affecting the country.

Hacking attempts

Lagmay said the hacking attempts came soon after other government websites were broken into to protest the Cybercrime Prevention Act or Republic Act No. 10175.

The hackers protested the new law curtailed their freedom of speech.

Lagmay first announced the online assaults through his Twitter account just after 10 a.m. yesterday.

In a later tweet, he said there were Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks on Project Noah’s servers.

In a DDOS assault, a hacker or group of hackers use several compromised systems to maliciously flood a single one.

Sought for comment later, Lagmay said the DOST engineers and programmers had to “put communication lines down” to repel the attacks.

A check of the website at the time showed that some weather-related data could not be accessed.

On top of the situation

Because the DOST personnel “were on top of the situation” though, Lagmay said, the website was completely functional after around four hours.

“Slow clap sa mga DOST engineers and programmers. We were just attacked but defenses repelled the assault,” he tweeted a few minutes before noon.

Lagmay said in the phone interview he had “no idea” who would want to hack the website but believed it may not have been connected to the controversial new law.

“These kinds of activities happen. To relate it to (that) is a little bit off,” he told the INQUIRER.