Police are investigating a hack of Cambodia’s newly launched voter-list website, a National Election Committee (NEC) official said on Thursday.
NEC spokesman Hang Puthea said that the breach of the online voter lists at www.voterlist.org.kh had been fixed by the organization’s technician, and that the original copies of voter registrations remained safe.
“However, we are still concerned they will change the names of voters on the website and give the NEC a bad name,” he said.
Since the NEC launched the website on Tuesday, Cambodians have complained of slow loading speeds as enrolled voters tried to verify their registrations.
Mr. Puthea said the website was overwhelmed with over 800,000 visitors as well as an attack by unknown hackers.
“We have two problems. The first is slow speed, but we already resolved that by buying more speed,” he said.
“Second, there was a hacker, but we fixed that,” he said, explaining that the breach had been sealed.
Mr. Puthea said National Police were investigating the case and believed the attack originated from outside of the country.
“There should be no concern about lost data because we kept an original copy,” he said. “It just annoyed people who wanted to check their names.”
National Police could not be reached for comment.
Prime Minister Hun Sen’s personal website was hacked in March, with its homepage briefly replaced with photos and videos of state-sponsored violence. The incident followed a 2013 post-election breach of some 30 public and private sector sites claimed by a Cambodian branch of the hacker group Anonymous.
