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OT-Morpho dismisses hacking claims in Kenya's electoral system

By , ITWeb
Kenya , 19 Sep 2017

OT-Morpho dismisses hacking claims in Kenya's electoral system

French digital security firm, OT-Morpho has dismissed claims that the electronic system it supplied to the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) to biometrically identify voters during Kenya's elections was hacked.

According to a report by tech trends Kenya, the firm has said that an audit of the electronic system used to tally votes in the cancelled presidential elections showed no manipulation of data.

After the election presidential candidate, Raila Odinga had controversially claimed that IEBC systems had been manipulated to give Kenyatta a lead.

Odinga claimed hackers used the log-in credentials of the late ICT manager Chris Musando who had been found dead two weeks prior to the elections.

The opposition leader went on to produced logs as evidence of how and when the IEBC database was hacked. He further claimed that an algorithm was introduced into the system to manipulate the results as they streamed in.

Tech trends Kenya reports that Odinga and the NASA coalition have corresponded with the French government and have accused OT-Morpho of allowing unauthorised access to its servers and manipulating the transmission of the presidential results.

Frederic Beylier, OT-Morpho's COO, is quoted as saying, the system "in no way suffered manipulation of data, attacks, and attempts to penetrate the system or anything of that kind."

"We obviously checked if there could have been questionable manipulations by any authorised or unauthorised persons and can confirm there was no manipulation of data that could raise questions," said Beylier in an audit.

OT-Morpho also said it had transmitted all its logs to the IEBC and was willing to participate in another external audit under the IEBC's authority.

OT-Morpho was contracted by IEBC to supply 45 000 tablets to be used to identify voters biometrically and an associated system used to transmit the results of votes counted by electoral officials, as well as a photograph of the paper form 34A on which votes were tallied.

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