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Popular election monitoring website targeted by hackers

Tempo.co - July 16, 2014

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Dini Pramita, Jakarta – The Kawal Pemilu (Guard the Elections) website www.kawalpemilu.org, which is maintained by volunteers to report the movement of vote results from the presidential election was attacked by hundreds of hackers throughout Wednesday afternoon. "Our website security systems were almost overwhelmed", the manager of the website Ainun Nadjib told Tempo.

Nadjib related how his team is still battling the attack by hundreds of hackers which is being countered by a team of only five website security operators. "The five of us are fighting hundreds like the war of Pandawa versus Kurawa [in the Mahabharata myth]", Nadjib told Tempo today, Wednesday July 15.

Nadjib said that they had to bring in two information system security experts to ward of the attack that has been unrelenting since 12noon local time. The most intensive attack is believed to have originated from Indonesia and was intentionally directed at causing a system down so that the data had to be revised.

Standard security measures, said Nadjib, had been in place since the website was first established. As a consequence of the wave of attacks, security measures were upgraded to close any holes that could potentially be exploited by hackers. "Certainly there was a quite heavy attack, so we had to put extra security measures into effect", he said.

Nadjib suspects that the attack was aimed at undermining the credulity of the site which become popular as a reference for monitoring the election recapitulation results. "The hacker's aim was to cause a system down, change data so it would be different from the General Elections Commission (KPU) data", said Nadjib.

The website has since Sunday begun to tabulate data to represent the real count of ballot recapitulation results. Kawal Pemilu's data is based on scans of C1 forms [polling station returns sheets] that are uploaded on the official KPU website.

Although it is not an official KPU website, Nadjib admitted that it has received a great deal of support. "Because Kawal Pemilu's data tabulation is the closest to reality", he said.

Notes

The Kawal Pemilu website <http://www.kawalpemilu.org>, which employs hundreds of volunteers to manually enter data from scans of polling station return sheets (C1 forms) uploaded to the General Elections Commission (KPU) official website <http://pilpres2014.kpu.go.id/c1.php>, has over the last week shown a stable national vote tabulation count of around 52 percent for the Joko Widodo-Jusuf Kalla presidential ticket and around 47 percent for the Prabowo Subianto-Hatta Rajasa presidential ticket.

[Translated by James Balowski for the Indoleft News Service.]

Source: http://pemilu.tempo.co/read/news/2014/07/16/269593567/Situs-Kawal-Pemilu-Dikeroyok-Ratusan-Hacker.

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