Manila, March 4 -- The Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) on Tuesday assured that there are several layers of security protecting the automated election system (AES), as it warned against "false prophets" who claim to be able to alter the May 12 elections.

In a statement on Tuesday, CICC Executive Director Alexander Ramos said the AES is protected by three layers of security, one of which is the AES machines are locked and cannot be altered once programmed.

Furthermore, election transmission is scheduled and uses a seven-layer encryption before the results are received by a consolidation server programmed to only accept encrypted files, with the key kept in the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP).

"Encrypted files pa...