The DG IT said that the website itself has no flaws. PHOTO: FILE
KARACHI: Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) resorted to blocking access to the Election Commission of Pakistan’s website owing to sudden, massive increases in traffic, said Director-General of the ECP’s IT department on Monday.
The website allegedly started receiving 50,000 visits per minute after the ECP began uploading the nomination papers of candidates. As a result, the website was unavailable for most visitors at the time, and accessibility remained limited throughout the day.
The DG IT said that the ECP website itself had no flaws and the commission is trying to find alternatives to handle the site's traffic.
The ECP website was defaced by an Indian hacker on Friday and remained unavailable for two days till the commission shifted the website to a new server.
The number of visits to the website has increased ahead of the general elections scheduled for May 11.
COMMENTS (10)
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It just sounds preposterous that PTCL is responsible for blocking access to ECP site. The whole world just starts pointing fingers and I think PTCL is the favorite for the finger pointing boys. I was able to access the site last night as well as the night before without any hitches. The amount of people logging into ECP site was completely un-heard off, any other site would have crashed let alone ECP. I hope the blame game would stop now that everything is back to normal.
@Hilmy Onal: Hahaha ...always a pleasure.
Being a IT company and on the base of my best knowledge, ECP website is not hosted and maintained by PTCL.It would have definitely been done by ECP web hosting company.
In reference to recently aired news regarding Election commission of Pakistan (ECP) website, PTCL would like to clarify that ECP website is not hosted and maintained by the company
Ahem... what is the purpose of a "denial of service" attack ? Overload the server and er...deny service to users.
What have our brilliant PTCL done when faced with a DOS attack ? Er.. block access to the same website resulting in.... denying service to the users.
Its great when the victim does the job for the attacker.
@Breaking Bad: What a pathetic comment!!!!!
50k/min visits look suspicious to me...most like a DDOS attack.
Not that I am against IK but a PTI jiyala would say "When IK comes he will hire better IT and make sure it doesnt happen ever again. Please vote for him". Hopefully the site is back up and running soon without any major loss but we should not politicize every event.
This shouldn't be any surprise if these are attempts by some of the candidates to prevent public scrutiny of their applications. Here's a small tech suggestion for the ECP - place your site behind CloudFlare to manage such attacks. Accountability to the masses must march on!
works fine for me on PTCL