After New Jersey officials specifically asked e-voting machines used in the February 5 presidential primary elections to be submitted to an in-depth analysis, Sequoia Voting Systems, the retailer company, announced that its website became inaccessible on Thursday night due to unauthorized access.

The company took action as soon as they realized what had happened and removed the “intrusive content,” spokeswoman Michelle Shafer said according to InfoWorld, adding that the company took further security measures and proceeded to “security enhancements” in order to protect the website from similar attacks.

The incident was uncovered by Ed Felten, the computer scientists in charge of investigating the e-voting machines in the New Jersey case. According to the same source, Felten reported that around 6:30 a.m. Eastern Time, Sequoia’s Ballot Blog had been replaced with a message saying it had been hacked, also including the name of the authors, but Felten didn’t seem to recall the name.

When the New Jersey officials requested the investigation on the February 5 voting machines after unusual errors appeared, Sequoia Voting Systems threatened to attack the decision in court for violation of the license agreement.

In a mail sent to Felton by Sequia and made public on his blog, the company said, besides the license agreement violation, that “Sequoia has also retained counsel to stop any infringement of our intellectual properties, including any non-compliant analysis. We will also take appropriate steps to protect against any publication of Sequoia software, its behavior, reports regarding same or any other infringement of our intellectual property.”

Sequoia replied however that it has all the rights to try to protect its intellectual property, and in this case, avoid the violation of their licensing agreement. Regarding the February 5 errors, the company’s spokeswoman said that Sequoia undertook its own independent review with the help of Kwaidan Consulting of Houston and that they “are confident that the review will show that Sequoia’s product bulletin issued recently to our Advantage customers does indeed explain how the reporting issue that occurred during the February 5th Primary Elections happened, and how it can be prevented.”