14 DAY TRIAL // Until December 4, users can express their opinion for Time’s Person of the Year poll. A couple of experts have managed to crack the voting system and decided to put the controversial Miley Cyrus in the lead.
In order to vote, users have to sign in with their Facebook or Twitter accounts. However, a couple of programmers named Gains and Marek have found a way to bypass the authentication and automatically cast a large number of votes for whoever they want.
The two have told The Daily Dot’s Fernando Alfonso III that they’ve developed C# and Ruby scripts that allowed them to vote on any Facebook user’s behalf, without their knowledge, simply by using their Facebook ID numbers.
The ID numbers, which are public, have been fed into a script, allowing Gains and Marek to automatically cast a large number of votes.
Initially, the hackers thought about making the Tsarnaev brothers, the ones responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings, the winners. However, they later decided on Miley Cyrus.
Shortly after putting their automated voting tool to work, Miley Cyrus went from being on the 15th place to the 5th place. The number one position was occupied by Edward Snowden, supported by the Anonymous community.
In the meantime, users on 4chan – who in 2009 made sure the website’s founder Christopher Poole (Moot) took first place – also started working on scripts to make sure Snowden won.
When The Daily Dot published it’s article, Miley Cyrus occupied 4th place with 3.9% of votes. However, at the time of writing, the former Disney celebrity takes the lead with 29%, followed by Snowden with 14.8%.
The fact that Time’s poll was hacked once again isn’t really surprising. In 2012, hackers rigged the system to make sure North Korean leader Kim Jong-un would win.
In the end, Time editors will name the person of the year, so it doesn’t necessarily mean that Miley Cyrus will win. However, it does show how easily online voting systems can be cracked.
The winner of reader polls will be announced on December 6. The Time’s Person of the Year winner will be announced on December 11.