Deliberate DOS Assault Disrupts NDP Voting

An advanced cyber-assault, which created chaos during the federal NDP party's election, has been attributed to a specialized Web hacker who utilized over 10,000 PCs globally for so slackening the pace of the online-voting that it started to crawl, thus published vancouversun.com dated March 28, 2012.

Actually, according to the provider of the Internet-based balloting, Scytl Canada, one Denial-of-Service assault was deliberately unleashed with the objective of disrupting the voting exercise by the NDP on 24th March 2012.

It was determined that the assault successfully clogged the channel of the voting mechanism so voters had to wait long to gain access. This slackening of the voting speed thus frustrated the party's representatives gathered at Toronto.

Clearly, following investigation, Scytl Canada stated that the attackers resorted to certain botnet, which contained hijacked PCs situated chiefly inside Canada. The company explained that the requisite agency for the attack along with the latter's demonstrated orchestration showed that the assault attempt was from an informed group/individual whose intention was to upset the election.

Indeed, in the case of Mike Doherty from southern Ontario, he couldn't cast his vote during the initial balloting round. So he tried again during the second round via logging in, but got a pop-up message, which told he'd already cast his vote.

Moreover, when the voting took excessive time, the NDP initially attributed it to unexpectedly large demand. However, the number of votes cast was merely 9,500 as against the entire 65,000 produced during the 4th Saturday-Sunday of March 2012 when most of the people belonging to NDP voted before time.

Currently, Scytl is conducting a forensic probe for tracing the source whose findings will get transmitted onto NDP's server following which the party's decision regarding if-or-not it'll have a criminal probe executed will stand.

Meanwhile, David Skillicorn, computer-security specialist at Queen's University said that anyone could pay $70/day, hire a botnet as well as have a massive number of compromised PCs that would overwhelm a website for him, while keep his identity anonymous as discovering such a person was nearly impracticable. Besides, investigators too frequently encountered jurisdictional problems, the expert explained. Vancouversun.com published this.

Related article: Deliberate DOS Attack Slows NAB Website

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