Today, we explain the attacks on Brazil’s electoral system — and the main takeaways from the election, looking forward to the presidential vote in 2022.
Hackers try to tamper with Brazilian municipal election
Every election is unique in its own way, but Brazil’s 2020 municipal vote was as peculiar as they come. Brazilians went to the polls amid a deadly pandemic, its worst economic downfall on record — without having fully grappled with the shattering of its political system, via the anti-corruption probe Operation Car Wash and the election of Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency in 2018. As expected, the election was anything but uneventful.
Coordinated hacking attacks. The Superior Electoral Court, which runs the country’s voting system, suffered two separate (and coordinated) hacking attacks. According to SaferNet, a non-profit organization which investigated the case, government systems suffered a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack and there was a leak of public servants’ private data.
- DDoS. A DDos attack is the orchestrated flooding of target websites by large numbers of computers at once. That happened early on Election Day, with multiple IP addresses from Portugal, Brazil, and New Zealand flooding the Superior Electoral Court’s network and destabilizing some online services. According...