Can Somebody Help ECP in Getting Their Website Up and Running?

3-28-2013_94237_lElection Commission of Pakistan is lately struggling with its website. During weekends it was targeted by hackers and website was put offline to make sure that hackers don’t harm their data – so innocent of ECP – and now they are snipping in and out due to traffic load they are getting on their website.

For those who aren’t familiar with the background, Election Commission of Pakistan was to put online the list of nominated candidates for next general elections on their website. This moment was caught by hackers who defaced the ECP website to earn some fame.

Later on, we were told that ECP website is moved to more secure location with ultra-high resources to meet the requirements.

However, on Monday, the website went offline due to the traffic it was getting. ECP said that access to its website was blocked by PTCL due to extremely high traffic. PTCL denied this and said that it neither hosts ECP websites nor it blocked the access to website.

This is probably first time in the history of ECP that they are getting few thousand hits from those who are interested to download the list of nominated candidates, and look what’s happening with them.

Its a shame that a government body is struggling this way in accommodating the traffic they are getting, especially when budgets are unlimited and resources available to them are countless.

Just to mention, they aren’t alone in mismanaging the traffic loads. Almost every education board struggles on results’ day and students are left with no option but to wait for hours (and at times for days) to get their results.

These days when servers, bandwidths and DDoS mitigation solutions are sold for pennies, a website getting down due to traffic load is a shame. Its about time that ECP (and all other government bodies) should employ competent and able staff to manage their websites to make sure that they don’t go offline just because of traffic loads.

It merits mentioning here that there are professionals in Pakistan who manage over 5 million hits per day on a single website, while there are others who can sustain over 10-25 Gbps DDoS attack.

Tech and telecom reporter for over 15 years


  • ECP wasn’t the only govt website.. according to Economyage – SECP witnessed the same

  • All this due to Safarshi IT staff in ECP. Managing and securing site is no big deal for Professional and Qualified Web Developer

    • Yes, it’s not a big issue to manage websites but ECP is taking web security for-granted and blaming PTCL entirely which has not any link to managing its website. It’s time to rethink, Election Commission Pakistan.

    • NADRA has lot of capable IT professionals and they have prepared E Voting solution in just 48 hrs… they manage a huge quantity of data and analyse it for further use regularly… however ECP has quit different environment… they see us like we are from Mars using computers and other technology because they feel danger from us due to advancement in technology and improvement in work quality…

      • 48 hours? Countries in the west have been unable to get a working and secure system set up in years. You can read so many analysis of their systems and all the criticism about them. For example see Avi Rubin’s papers and articles on digital voting.

        There is no way they were able to prepare a solution in 48 hours unless it meant they used an already created solution and customised it.

  • We all know the thingy that that PTCL neither hosts ECP websites, so how could it blocked the access to website.This saying of ECP is totally of no means.They are blaming other organization for no reason.Time to see own rashness ECP.!

  • Um they should just use Varnish (caching proxy) and set-up CloudFlare (CDN + DDoS protection) and they’d be fine.

  • I agree with the sentiment of the article, it was just stupid on the behalf of the ECP to blatantly blame PTCL for the crash of their site. I agree a few bucks spent on maintaining and securing their website will not hurt the ECP. However, the indian hacker surely was an unwanted nuisance.

  • They have team of grade 17 IT directors and software developers.

    This is simple , the IT Professionals in Govt are not there because of there skills, they are there because of Safarish.

    They should out-source their IT support

  • they should zip up all the data and pages and distribute them with a torrent.

  • They should contact me.. I can set them up on SSD Cloud with clustering running multiple servers. At least it wont go down due to traffic or such…


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