The Issues and Advocacy Center (The CENTER) has urged the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and the appropriate government agencies such as Congress to review the operational procedures related to the conduct of the scheduled national elections on May 10, 2010 as it raised the possibility of failure of elections following reports that hackers worldwide have decided to take up the challenge hurled by Smartmatic-TIM which offered a reward of P10-million to anyone who can hack into the country’s automated poll system.
Ed M. Malay, director of The CENTER, said that the idea of hacking into the Philippine automated poll system was raised albeit not publicly during the recent DEFCON conference held from July 30 to August 2, 2009 at the Riviera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas which gathered more than 5,000 computer wizards and those who identify themselves as hackers who paid an admission fee of $120.00 to participate in the conference.
After it signed the contract with the Comelec, the men behind the Smartmatic-TIM partnership boasted that it will take at least six days for hackers to intrude into the automated poll system that the firm will use in partnership with the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and that it would be moot and academic by then because the Comelec can proclaim the winners for national positions and down to the local level in just two days.
Even it continues to deny that their system can be attacked and or hacked, computer experts at the National Computer Center and the government’s cyber agency are convinced that the Philippine automated poll system can be hacked and or could be subjected to cyber attack and this can only be neutralized if an adequate security system is in place. The Philippines, said Malay, is the most vulnerable to cyber attacks because the country and the government and or even the private firms do not have an established security mechanism to protect the system.
DEFCON which regularly meets annually in the last week of July is considered as the worldwide association of hackers and computer geeks which was founded by Jeff Moss who is known in Cyberworld as “Dark Tangent” and who is reportedly responsible for the distribution of several viruses that has brought down computer systems worldwide. In recognition of his expertise, Moss was recently sworn in by the United States Homeland Security Administration as a member of its national advisory council.
Hackers, Malay said, are not in it for the money stressing that the P10-million being offered by Smartmatic is not the objective of hackers. These cyber criminals are motivated by the challenge especially when an organization such as Smartmatic-TIM raises a challenge. It is the adventure that primes up these hackers to develop a system that can paralyze if not totally break down another system.
