Tech firm says NDP vote hit with hundreds of thousands of malicious requests
OTTAWA - The company that ran the NDP leadership vote says more than 10,000 "malevolent" Internet addresses were used in an effort to jam the online voting system in a denial-of-service attack.
The statement from Scytl Canada describes Saturday's cyber attack as an organized, professional and illegal effort to thwart democracy.
Susan Crutchlow, the general manager of Scytl Canada, says the Spanish-based company deeply regrets the inconvenience to the NDP but lauds the party for its patience as the company dealt with the attack.
Scytl, a Spanish-based company that provides online voting services to countries around the world, said it has identified well over 10,000 IP addresses that generated many hundreds of thousands of false voting requests to the system.
The company says the so-called malevolent "botnet" used computers around the world but mainly in Canada.
Long delays in voting at the NDP convention were first attributed by the party to larger-than-expected demand, but only about 9,500 votes of the 65,000 total were generated on the weekend, with the vast majority of party members voting in advance.
