DTI, DOST websites get hacked with spammy Scatter Slots game promotions

With the news of restricting online gambling in the Philippines, gamblers are rushing to withdraw their money from their gambling accounts before the deadline issued by GCash (August 18, 8pm) and Maya.

As we investigate further the proliferation of these online gambling sites, it turns out that some of them have been doing some hacking on the side and targetting government websites to rank on search engines, especially Google.

We just discovered a few pages of DTI and DOST that have been apparently hacked by gambling operators. In this instance, the one we spotted were for the game Scatter Slots.

As shown in these screen shots of Google search results, Scatter has managed to inject pages into several DTI and DOST subdomains. While some of these pages already return a 404 Error (Page Not Found), others will re-direct you to more spammy, illegal online gambling sites.

Google search has also indicated that these pages were first indexed as early as May and June of 2025. Even searching for the term “scatter” on Google will yield results on the first pages that includes the DOST and DTI websites.

We call upon the webmasters of these pages to do a thorough sweep of their domain and look for these injected pages.