Hackers Carry Out Attack on Election Commission`s IT Programmers

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - General Election Commission (KPU) Commissioner Pramono Ubaid Tanthowi admits hacking attempts were made against Telegram and Whatsapp accounts of the commission’s IT programmers.

However, Pramono assured that the hacking attempt did not affect KPU’s real count for the 2018 regional head elections (Pilkada). “It will definitely have no effect, considering that the real count is manually recapitulated,” said Pramono at his office on Thursday, June 28.

KPU`s programmer Harry Sufehmi told Tempo that he had received several terrors from an unknown number since Wednesday night. Based on the screenshot he showed, Harry and several KPU's IT members were terrorized by dozens of calls from numbers listed as international phone numbers.

“There were hundreds of missed calls per hour. I even had to turn off my cellphone since it overheated,” said Harry.

Harry Sufehmi is in charge of managing the KPU IT system for the 2019 presidential election. He further revealed that programmers and IT experts at the Computer Science Center (Pusilkom), who handle the 2018 Pilkada, experienced the same terrors.

He explained that his Whatsapp and Telegram accounts were targeted by the hacking attempt, and the hackers - suspected to originate from a server in Singapore - had even managed to briefly breach his Telegram account before Harry immediately countered the attack. 

“We suspect that there are attempts to disrupt and cut our communications,” Harry theorized. He revealed that the main problem is that the SMS system (protocol SS7) is susceptive to hacks, which can cause everything linked to it such as Facebook, Whatsapp, and Telegram, to be hacked via a secret code sent through an SMS. 

According to Harry, the election commission (KPU) is currently in the process of filing an official police report to the National Police.  

Dewi Nurita