PKR POLLS | Results from the PKR election for the Julau division have been suspended after what the party election committee claims was a "cyber attack".

PKR central election committee director Rashid Din said that at 2pm today, IT and system officers detected that 10 of the tablets used for e-voting today had been "intruded" by an app called Prey.

"The information received was that this app was used to delete the e-voting app, steal data, change passwords, and control the tablets from a remote computer," Rashid said in a statement.

PKR deputy president candidate Rafizi Ramli, who is in Julau, claimed earlier today that the Prey app was "malware."

Read more: Rafizi claims Julau tablets compromised with ‘malware’

Rashid said preliminary investigations found that the Prey app was physically installed on the tablets, which were handed to the Julau PKR division at 4am this morning.

On its website, Prey brands itself as anti-theft software that enables users to track their devices, but also “wipe data and folders remotely on a lost device.”

It further allows users to manage and perform tasks on “thousands of devices” simultaneously.

Rashid said after detecting the app on the tablets, the IT officers had moved to put the e-voting app in "offline-mode," while also deactivating administrator privileges to the apps and uninstalling Prey.

He said the Julau results will be suspended until the tablets are recovered and data consolidation is completed. 

The election committee is also investigating if "cyber attacks" were carried out in other PKR divisions.

Julau has been under the spotlight for its drastic spike in membership on June 26, which saw its members increase from 603 to 13,549 in just one day.

Complaints of irregularities, including the registration of members of other political parties without their knowledge and using dubious addresses, have since surfaced and are being probed by the MACC.

However, PKR secretary-general Saifuddin Nasution has since cleared the division of any suspicion and contended that the membership registration process was above board.