Week 32 Story 63- 'Should we worry the general election will be hacked?'

'Should we worry the general election will be hacked?'

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/20/uk-general-election-2017-hacking-ddos-attacks-bots-fake-news

• The public administration and constitutional affairs committee (Pacac) said that the failure of the voter registration website, “had indications of being a DDoS ‘attack’”
•  it mentioned Russia and China
• Labour MP Paul Flynn, who sits on the Pacac, certainly thinks we should be worried – although closer inspection of the report finds that, beyond the headlines, there’s a startling lack of evidence for those particular fears
• Not only is it not actually hacking at all, but it also looks rather similar to when a lot of people at once try to use a server that doesn’t have the capacity
•  The University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, found a huge number of Twitter bots posting pro-Leave propaganda in the run up to the EU referendum

The actual report reveals the researchers can’t directly identify bots – they just assume accounts that tweet a lot are automated – and admit “not all of these users or even the majority of them are bots