A cyber criminal targeted pro-Clinton phone lines a day before the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, in order to interfere with the Democratic nominee´s efforts to become the new chief of state. Apparently, the hacker is a 4chan user known by the pseudonym Sparky, since it posted on the site that he/she ha leveraged the Mirai botnet to conduct the cyber strike against Hillary Clinton.
It Also Harmed Trump´s Campaign
However, the hacker´s actions could have also affected Donald Trump´s campaign. It remains unknown if the cyber criminal target was also the Republican nominee, which means that it is indefinite if this situation represented a mistake or a wrong action.
According to the International Business Times, TCN´s chief technology Jesse Bird explained that the Utah-based company was the main target of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that lasted around 24 hours, starting late on Sunday. The cyber strike took the firm´s web-based software offline for much of Monday, which is the most important day of the election season to make get-out-the-vote-phone calls, according to most political groups in the U.S. However, there was no major damage
Hacker´s Message In 4chan
In fact, Bird told to Wired that it was a huge irony how the cyber strike also harmed Republican calls while it wanted to make damage to pro-Clintons. Also, the TCN´s chief technology stated that the firm found the spot where the hacker could be able to hurt them, making the company give an extra effort that prevented the services to suffer a major damage.
On the controversial website 4chan, the cyber criminal known as Sparky wrote: "List targets here that if taken out could harm Clinton's chances of winning and I will pounce on them like a wild animal. Not sleeping until after this election is over."
Although it was a huge problem, TCN managed to deal with the attack by quadrupling its number of proxy servers, in order to absorb and filter out the attack traffic, as reported by the International Business Times. In fact, the firm hired the prestigious cybersecurity firm CloudFlare to help protect them from any future strike of this kind, which was also suffered by major websites as Twitter and Reddit some weeks ago.
