Thousands of attempts to crash e-voting site for Kurdistan referendum "failed," developer says

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan 24) – The company who developed the website for people in the Diaspora to cast their ballot in the Kurdistan Referendum announced it had successfully stopped thousands of attempts to take down the e-voting site.

Speaking to Kurdistan 24, Gohdar Jadir Ibrahim, Director of Awrosoft Company, the website developer responsible for the Kurdistan Referendum e-voting portal, confirmed there were hacking attempts to prevent people of the Kurdistan Region in the Diaspora from voting, but that they had “all failed.”

“In three days, we received 815,000 visits. From there, there were 125,000 DDoS attacks (Denial of Service attacks aimed at a website), the use of 155,000 illegal bots, 106 illegal resource access (Attempts to access the Administrative page), 62 cross-site scripting (XSS attacks to bypass access controls), and 260 SQL injections (attempts to run malicious SQL queries),” he said.

Tens of SMS attacks were also launched to create issues in the system, Ibrahim added, but to no avail.

The director clarified that most of the attacks were conducted on Sep. 24 and Sep. 25, the day of the landmark vote on independence from Iraq held in the Kurdistan Region.

“We broke down where the attacks came from and found a majority came from Germany (18.4%), Sweden (13.8%), US (13.6%), UK (13%) and even from Iraq (13.6%) and Iran (3.4%). None of them were successful.”

According to the Kurdistan Region’s Independent High Elections and Referendum Commission (IHERC), the number of the Diaspora voters eligible to vote on Monday was unknown as no official data on it exists. However, 98,945 people registered and cast their votes in the referendum.

People of the Kurdistan Region living abroad were able to cast their votes from Sep. 23 to Sep. 25. The first electronic vote in the independence referendum was cast in China.