NBI to lend assistance on Comelec probe if necessary —Guevarra

The National Bureau of Investigational will help in investigating the alleged hacking of the Commission and Elections (Comelec) systems, the Department of Justice said Tuesday.

For now, however, Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra said it will let Comelec finish its internal probe.

“We’ll let the Comelec finish its own internal probe,” Guevarra said in a message to reporters.

“If a wider investigation is found necessary and NBI assistance would be useful, we’d gladly oblige,” he added.

On Monday, the Comelec started validating a newspaper report that hackers downloaded 60 gigabytes of data from its systems—a hack that is said could compromise the integrity of Eleksyon 2022.

Comelec spokesman James Jimenez said the hackers had accessed data that have yet to be encoded into its systems, including usernames and personal identification numbers of vote-counting machines.

Jimenez said authors of the report had also been invited to shed light on the newspaper report.—LDF, GMA News