This spring's ASUAF elections may be held the good old-fashioned way, on paper, after a hacking during winter break forced the student government to shut down its Web server.

The server housed ASUAF's Web site and provided free Web space for students' personal sites or class project sites. The board that oversees the student government's elections will have to decide soon whether elections will be paper-only or if ASUAF can use another server, said President Sven Gilkey.

"The election board will be responsible for finding the technology to do it," he said. But he added, "I'm under the impression that we will probably just use paper ballots."

The hack came in January through an account with a "very weak password of ‘123456'," according to a message posted on the ASUAF Web site before the server was completely shut down. The server was then used as a gateway to try to attack other UAF servers. ASUAF shut the site down minutes after detecting the hack, the message said.

Users still have access to their files in an archive directory hosted by the Computer Science Department. More than 1,100 sets of user files have been archived, though they are no longer viewable online. ASUAF President Sven Gilkey said that most of the complaints he's received are about not having access to the ASUAF site itself.

"This is the first problem we've had," he said. "It's almost a decade old."

Instead of upgrading or fixing the old server, ASUAF will be buying a new one, Gilkey said. The student government has allocated $2,100 toward buying a new one. It hopes to have one ordered by mid-April, and the next president would be charged with making sure it gets online and maintained, he said.

But signs of discontent over the computer problems seemed to manifest themselves in recent weeks within ASUAF. At a meeting two weeks ago, Senate Chair Pat Frymark announced that the Web designer, Matt Schroder, had resigned, according to meeting minutes. Frymark told the senate that the position may or may not be reopened this semester.

ASUAF is also working with the Office of Information Technology to find a way to protect the new server better. Student government officials are also trying to build into their plan that the server will be upgraded every five years. The old server was six or seven years old and had never been upgraded.

ASUAF began hosting online elections in fall 2002. While paper ballots may seem daunting for an election, Gilkey said that in the mid-90s thousands of students voted in campus elections via paper ballots. The voter turnouts for spring 2005 and 2006 were 337 and 344, respectively.

This year's elections are set for May 1 and 2. If they are held using paper ballots, the ASUAF Elections Board, along with ASUAF's executive officer, will count the ballots, report them to Frymark as senate chair and the senate will then vote on accepting the results.

Currently, Gilkey said there is no certainty about who is running for president.

"It's tradition that people are kind of covert about running," he said.

Petitions have been circulating campus and are due April 13.

Computer security has been an issue in the last couple years with the university, most notably 2005's hacks into a server at the Bethel campus in which more than 38,000 students' names and Social Security numbers were compromised.

According to OIT reports, 51 intrusions occurred at UAF between June 30 and Dec. 31, 2006. The reports say that most of the compromised machines were used to attack other machines, spread viruses, or spam.