DICT Confirms House Website Defaced in Second Legislative Cyberattack This Week

House of Representative Website | Screenshot as of 10:36 PM - June 13, 2026

 — The official website of the House of Representatives was defaced and taken offline on Saturday evening, June 13, 2026, marking the second high-profile cyberattack on a legislative branch of the Philippine government within a single week.

The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) immediately confirmed the cybersecurity breach. In response, the website’s administrators took the entire domain down as a precautionary measure to prevent further unauthorized access and preserve digital evidence. As of late Saturday night, the page continues to return standard server error messages to visitors.

Hacktivists Claim Responsibility

The cyberattack was claimed by an online hacktivist collective that left a prominent protest message on the lower chamber's landing page before it was shuttered. Screenshots circulating rapidly on social media verified that the group defaced the portal to rail against systemic state anomalies.

"Corruption is more than stolen money, it is stolen opportunity, stolen justice, and stolen trust," the hackers wrote in their public message.

Parallel Attacks on Legislative Portals

This development follows a nearly identical security breach that struck the Senate of the Philippines website on Wednesday night, June 10, 2026. In that instance, a separate local hacktivist group known as Nullsec Philippines gained entry to the upper chamber's servers. They altered its contents with digital graffiti accusing lawmakers of prioritizing political ambition over public service.

While initial assessments from the Senate Electronic Data Processing-Management Information System (EDP-MIS) bureau indicated that no confidential state records were compromised, the Senate portal had to be pulled and placed under an extended "maintenance mode" while technical teams painstakingly reinforced firewall rules.

Government Probe Underway

The DICT, alongside the Philippine National Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-PH), has deployed forensic investigators to isolate the breach. Authorities are looking into the vulnerability vector exploited by the attackers and attempting to determine whether any sensitive data exfiltration occurred before the public defacement took place.

The serial cyberattacks have sparked alarm among lawmakers regarding the vulnerability of government IT infrastructure. Reacting to the escalating situation, Senate Pro Tempore Sherwin Gatchalian warned that these breaches represent a coordinated, compounding risk.

"This cannot be treated as an isolated incident," Gatchalian said in an official statement. "The attack on our systems... is a crime. And all criminals must be held accountable under the law."

The DICT noted that a comprehensive threat actor attribution process is being coordinated with law enforcement units to track down the digital signatures left behind by the perpetrators.