The Drama of the Election

The Drama of the Election

With everything being connected to online these days and having an election that is so internet based, many are getting worried about a potential cyber attack that may be happening Election Day, November eighth. In a recent CNN article, Adam D’Angelo, a former chief technology officer tweeted out saying worries of a "good chance of major internet attack Nov 8th." He goes on saying how many groups have the power to do so, and many have the incentive based on this may be a close election. Something as simple as Maps being down in phones might have the chance of not letting voters find their place to vote and then they won’t be able to costing a candidate a possible hundred or thousand votes. One even thinks it will affect young people more, since young people rely on their phones to get them more places.

A discussion unfolds on twitter with various Twitter executives, facebook Cofounder, and former Google engineer about what may happen. They clearly would like to prevent any attacks from the internet during the elections, and there has been a small talk of it, but now that the time is so close there may be only so much they can do. The chances of a cyber attack seem to be low according to David Byttow, but since this election has caused so much debate as is there is nothing that could appear to be too surprising.

According to the article, if a cyber attacker were to attack the maps to try and prevent people from voting they would have to take down Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Yahoo Maps to cut off majority of the voters. Hacking into one of the three itself is extremely difficult, although there are many people able to do it. The consequences for such actions could end up quite severe. The most likely event would be that hackers hack into news websites and informational webpages and try and slow down the feed of how the election is going to try and corrupt people