December 3rd, 2008
Drexel students hijack online poll, get underwear
A few weeks ago I saw that students at my alma mater organized a small botnet to push Drexel to the front of the queue for Victoria’s Secret’s line of university branded underwear. It took a brief remark from a blog I frequent to make me realize that there is actually a small computer security story here.
Bruce Schneier, when commenting on this story, stated that preventing ballot stuffing in online polls is relatively hard. While running a perfect poll would involve somewhat sophisticated engineering, mitigating the effects of online ballot stuffing isn’t too impossible. Rate limiting by IP address, requiring a CAPTCHA, or running the poll in an environment that provides a higher level of identity management such as Facebook are all options.
Creating a poll with a minimum of security provisions actually benefits the poll taker from a marketing perspective in many ways. No one is interested in a contest whose outcome is predetermined purely by the size of the matriculating class. Having a university known for its engineering programs with a majority male student body win its own line of women’s underwear does make news, however.
Go Dragons!
Adam J. O'Donnell, Ph.D. is an R&D engineer who has focused on computer security since 2000. He currently is the Director of Emerging Technologies at Cloudmark, a messaging security company located in San Francisco. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 12/03/08
