Man arrested for hacking EC's portal for issuing voter cards: Police

A 30-year-old man was arrested in Jharkhand's Palamu district on Tuesday for allegedly hacking the Election Commission's portal used for generating voter identity cards, police said.

Mukesh Kumar was arrested from Karso village in Chaonpur police station area on a complaint from the EC, they said.

He was interrogated by several officers, including Palamu's Deputy Commissioner Shashi Ranjan, officials said.

A team of half dozen investigators, comprising police officers and civil officials, are probing the case, they added.

The arrested is suspected to be part of a network that has links in several districts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, officials said.

The EC had informed the Palamau district administration that the URL used for generating voter identity cards from a Customer Service Point (CSP) in Chaunpur's Karso area was hacked and fake voter identity cards were made, they said.

The EC had given the responsibility of making voter ID cards to a private company, giving it a URL and the tampering was done with that URL, officials said.

However, the police are yet to find any evidence of the CSP's involvement in the hacking, they said.

The arrested man told the investigators that the URL was given to him by a person from Ranchi, and the URL was also given to someone in Hazaribagh, they said.