Security agencies, IEC on red alert
Kenya and the United States’s recent experiences highlight how outside manipulation can compromise the legitimacy of electoral processes
The government’s security cluster is working to mitigate any threat of cyberattacks to the May 8 elections. The national police spokesperson, Vish Naidoo, said crime intelligence, defence intelligence and state security were working closely with the South African Police Service (SAPS).
The Electoral Commission of South Africa’s (IEC’S) systems have been increasingly digitised in recent years.
IEC chief electoral officer Sy Mamabolo on Wednesday said: “Measures are being taken to ensure the integrity of our network even during the period of elections ... Threats remain every day, and threats are directed at all institutions almost on a daily basis but, for the purposes of our report to the nation, we have taken reasonable precautions to obviate the possibility.”
There have been cases or allegations of cyberinterference and cyberattacks in countries such as the United States and in Africa.
In South Africa, many government websites have been hacked, including those of the presidency and the SAPS. The ANC website was hacked in 2013 and it is estimated that businesses have lost about R2.2-billion a year to cybercrime, according to a South African Banking Risk Information Centre report released last year.
Sources in two political parties said they believed the chief risk would be when results were submitted to the IEC’S national results centre.
It is understood that the matter has been raised with the IEC and the commission is going to allow parties to inspect its information technology infrastructure in the coming weeks.
The elections take place in seven weeks’ time.
Mamabolo said experts were correct when they said no network is 100% safe, so the IEC had recently overhauled most of its digital infrastructure.
There were some outstanding tenders for hardware, which the commission was in the process of procuring.
“Ordinarily, at a time such as this, we do a security audit of the network and it’s not anything that is new. So we have done a security audit of the network. As you know, this is an area where we do not wish to get into details, you will understand why,” he said. “We have taken precautions and some of those measures are currently being implemented, others have already been implemented but unfortunately we cannot get into specific granular details about those types of things.”
Mamabolo said the IEC used both manual and digital processes, espe-