Malacañang ‘seeding’ leaked Comelec data probed

MANILA, Philippines – Malacañang is conducting an investigation into the report showing that the mail server of the Palace was used to torrent and seed the data of Filipino voters stored in breached Commission on Elections (Comelec) database.

“An investigation is being conducted by the Office of the President’s MIS (Management Information System),” the Palace said in a statement released Saturday.

The Palace confirmed that the subdomain mail.malacanang.gov.ph served as their mail server address since May 2011.

Based on the update posted on the Twitter account of Presidential Communications Development and Strategic Planning Office Undersecretary Manuel Quezon III, the MIS department is conducting a review on their firewall and server logs for any activity that would determine the following:

• If the server was used to download and seed the torrent, or
• If the server was compromised or if a remote client was using the mail server to access the internet
• If the culprit intentionally forged his hostname to appear as mail.malacanang.gov.ph with malicious intention

“So far, according to the MIS department, no usual activity has been detected, which suggests the possibility of a malicious forgery,” the statement read.

“It will be the Executive Secretary to determine the accountability, if proven that someone indeed used the mail server to download the COMELEC data,” it added.

Comelec spokesperson James Jimenez meanwhile said the automated elections will be run on a different server, not on the one that was hacked.