One of the largest and most sophisticated distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks has hit a controversial online democratic polling mechanism regarding Hong Kong's upcoming elections.
During the weekend, about 680,000 people voted in the unofficial poll offered by residents of the special administrative region to highlight the political representatives they prefer.
The candidates were officially selected by a committee of 1,200 members, which is widely known to be very friendly to Beijing.
CloudFlare said it was still fending off the sophisticated DDoS as of Monday morning, long after the polls closed.
The founder and CEO of the company Matthew Prince said it was the most sophisticated attack he has seen so far.
Although the perpetrators were not identified, Popvote.hk was an obvious direct threat to Beijing, which had been planned for the introduction of universal voting for Hong Kong since 2017.
Cloudflare claims they learned about it before the attacks were carried out and created a series of DNS collection zones that reversed the attack, so it never reached Cloudflare or Popvote.hk.
