TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The website of General Election Commission (KPU) experienced technical issues on Saturday, June 30. From 1 to 4 am the kpu.go.ig page was inaccessible.
The cause of the temporary trouble is yet to be known and Tempo's attempts to confirm what may have caused it has not been responded by two KPU Commissioners who we texted through WhatsApp. Whenever Tempo attempted to open the website, a reminder suggesting that the connection has timed out always appeared.
The technical issue occurred in three days after KPU’s programmers and IT members received terrors and hacking attempts. Following the simultaneous regional head election (Pilkada) on Wednesday, several of the KPU members received numerous missed calls from unknown numbers.
Read: Hackers Carry Out Attack on Election Commissions IT Programmers
As previously reported, 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 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.
M Rosseno Aji
