KARACHI: The Election Commission of Pakistan has “temporarily suspended” its website after possible threats of a cyber-attack, a senior official of the commission said on Saturday.

“There’s been no ‘cyber-attack’ as such, as we tackled the threat that the website was receiving,” said Abdul Qadir, the ECP’s Sindh Provincial Director IT.

However, another ECP official in Islamabad, requesting not be named as he was not authorized to speak to the media, said the website, hosted on a Canadian server, has been under attack since late Friday.

“It (ECP website) has been under attack since we put up a list of defaulters including fake degree holders and dual nationals,” the official said.

As of now, no data, server or email had been lost, the official confirmed.

The ECP administration has “tactfully suspended” the website in an effort to dilute the attack, he said.

“It is like war. When you are attacked you displace yourself for sometime and then come back after diluting it,” the official added.

The official said that the ECP has a large electronic reservoir of data and if the host server was based in Pakistan, he said, “the attack would have been severe.”

However, the official said that they were “mentally prepared.”

“The ECP is assertive and has scrutinised everyone recently. We are prepared for all sorts of attacks,” he said.