Scytl Canada, the company that conducted the NDP’s online voting, explains what happened this weekend.
Scytl Canada, the company that conducted the NDP’s online voting, explains what happened this weekend.
This was an organized and large-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack launched against the voting system in an orchestrated, professional, albeit illegal manner.
Well over 10,000 malevolent IP addresses (computers) have been identified so far, as having generated many hundreds of thousands of false voting requests to the system. This effectively “jammed up the pipe” into the voting system, delaying voter access. This network of malevolent computers, commonly known as a “botnet”, was located on computers around the world but mainly in Canada.
The required organization and the demonstrated orchestration of the attack indicates that this was a deliberate effort to disrupt or negate the election by a knowledgeable person or group.