Organisers of a mock chief executive election say a suspected hacking attack has halted online voting. The Director of the University of Hong Kong’s Public Opinion Programme, Robert Chung, said the website became paralysed early this morning. Dr Chung said hackers had attacked it during tests a few days ago, and some of his colleagues’ passwords had been inexplicably changed. “We found incidents of abnormally high hit rates on March 21 … We registered about a million hits per second. We think there could not be another reason other than cyber attacks on us,” he said.
“This morning, shortly after 7:00am, we had another attack which basically tore down our servers, so we couldn’t conduct any electronic voting. The abnormal number of hits have exceeded what we can predict or control.” He said the disruptions were “indications of high level attacks” but he did not speculate about who could be responsible.
Full Article: Hackers blamed for disrupted mock poll.