PHILIPPINES — While Newsbreak magazine is used to facing libel suits from angry politicians and squaring off with any number of public figures and companies over its investigative reporting, the website for Newsbreak faced a new kind of threat last week – link spammers.According to GMANews.tv, a “content partner” site for the Newsbreak site at www.newsbreak.com.ph, last Friday a link-spam attack was perpetrated by a group of as-yet-unknown spammers, in which the spammers added thousands of trackback links to the Newbreak website – trackbacks that led to adult websites.

“It took me hours last night to manually delete all of them,” Newsbreak online editor Gemma Bagayaua said of the porn trackback link, according to GMANews.tv.

In all, Bagayaua said she found “over 27,000” such links on the Newsbreak site.

As of Tuesday morning, Bagayaua said the Newsbreak staff still had no idea as to who the attackers might be.

“We don’t know who did this,” said Bagayaua, adding that it’s possible the attackers wanted to slow down the site, but it is also “possible that they are merely pranksters.”

For the time being, the trackback feature of the site has been closed, according to GMANews.tv, and site visitors are asked to log on before posting any comments to the site.

The attack comes just weeks after Newsbreak officially stopped publishing a print edition; the magazine printed its last hard copy in January and converted to an online-only publication.

In a letter to readers dated January 29, Newsbreak editor in chief Marites Danguilan Vitug stated that the publication would “continue our work online, the platform that is transforming journalism by opening the doors of our profession to citizens all over the world and, at the same time, forming tightly knit communities and audiences in cyberspace.”