EU Referendum Petition Hijacked By Bots

Following the news about an online petition calling for a second EU referendum has been hijacked by automated bots adding false signatures. The House of Commons petitions committee said it had removed 77,000 signatures and was investigating. Javvad Malik, Security Advocate at AlienVault commented below.

Javvad Malik, Security Advocate at AlienVault:

“Bots come in various guises and can cause damage to a website or the integrity of its data via content theft, click fraud, traffic fraud, comment (or in this case petition) spam, server slowdowns etc.

Any public-facing website, particularly sites such as online petitions which trigger actions when a certain number of signatures have been collected should have protection in place in order to safeguard the integrity and availability of its information with anti-bot and anti-DDoS measures amongst others.

In order to protect against all bots, companies should deploy various detection techniques and be continually kept up to date to detect bot activity as soon as possible. Having a good source of threat intelligence can help identify and block bot-traffic early.”