The Manila city government revealed on Friday that the registration website of ManilaCovax was attacked by automated bots on Wednesday night, August 4.

In a report posted by Mayor Isko Moreno on August 7, he provided an update on the troll attacks and hacking incident on their vaccination website.

According to the report, their website www.manilacovid19vaccine.ph/registration.php has received 1.02 million people sending their registration for vaccination for that night. With that huge number of registrants, it causes the website to be taken down.

“The individual/s created an automation on their end to loop/spam or to keep refreshing the registration site,” stated in the report.

“We detected that on a per-minute basis, there were 133 to 200+ requests,” they added.

“To have the website reach its threshold in order to create downtime to error 502,” read the LGU’s report.

As a result, it would be difficult for registrants to register on that website.

Furthermore, the report stated that it is a very unusual scenario and that the incident is definitely a BOT triggered.

“Based on our experience, we highly suspect that whoever is doing this has a troll farm generating machinery,” stated in the report.

However, the LGU said that they were able to locate and identify IP addresses.

As a solution, the LGU planned to “create another layer of protection” and use the reCAPTCHA system to prevent spamming, in addition to other precautionary measures.

As of writing, the city government of Manila announced that they will be holding 24/7 vaccination starting on Sunday, August 8 in order to accommodate more people, but they remind the public that walk-ins are not allowed.