A number of Philippine government and educational websites have been hacked by spammers who took advantage of lax security measures to redirect unsuspecting visitors to online casinos.
I first noticed this massive security breach on May 25, 2024 as I was searching on Google. It seems that the hackers found vulnerabilities in the WordPress plugins of several government (.gov.ph) and educational (.edu.ph) websites and created spam pages that promote online casinos. Some pages even automatically redirect to these online casinos.
Riding on the authority and trustworthiness of these government and educational websites, the spam pages immediately ranked high on Google for various search terms such as “SSS online appointment.” It is unknown how many Internet users clicked on these pages from Google.
Affected Institutions
I’ve compiled a list of Philippine government and educational institutions whose websites have been hacked by spammers. I will update this list if and when I find more affected websites.
Department of Education (https://portal.dpap.deped.gov.ph/)
Department of Interior and Local Government / DILG School of Local Governance (https://slg.lga.gov.ph/)
Department of Trade and Industry (https://www.tradelinephilippines.dti.gov.ph/)
University of the Philippines Baguio (https://dmcsweb.upb.edu.ph/)
Trimex Colleges (https://happykids.trimexcolleges.edu.ph/)
Ateneo de Davao University (https://cssec-api.addu.edu.ph/)
I have reported the incident to the Google search team via X/Twitter, but they have not yet acknowledged my report nor acted on it.
I call on the IT departments of the affected institutions to clean up their websites of these spam pages as well as to update their WordPress plugins and PHP scripts to the latest versions.
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