At Home and Abroad: The Use of Denial-of-service Attacks during Elections in Nondemocratic Regimes

• Author: Mattijs Jonker,Alistair King,Philipp M. Lutscher,Nils B. Weidmann,Alberto Dainotti,Margaret E. Roberts
• Published date: 01 February 2020
• Date: 01 February 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0022002719861676
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

At Home and Abroad:

The Use of Denial-of-

service Attacks during

Elections in Nondemocratic

Regimes

Philipp M. Lutscher

1

, Nils B. Weidmann

1

,

Margaret E. Roberts

2

, Mattijs Jonker

3

, Alistair King

4

,

and Alberto Dainotti

4

Abstract

In this article, we study the political use of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, a par-

ticular form of cyberattack that disables web services by flooding them with high

levels of data traffic. We argue that websites in nondemocratic regimes should be

especially prone to this type of attack, particularly around political focal points such

as elections. This is due to two mechanisms: governments employ DoS attacks to

censor regime-threatening information, while at the same time, activists use DoS

attacks as a tool to publicly undermine the government’s authority. We analyze

these mechanisms by relying on measurements of DoS attacks based on large-scale

Internet traffic data. Our results show that in authoritarian countries, elections

indeed increase the number of DoS attacks. However, these attacks do not seem to

be directed primarily against the country itself but rather against other states that

serve as hosts for news websites from this country.

1

Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany

2

Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA

3

Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Twente, Enschede,

The Netherlands

4

Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis, San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California,

San Diego, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Nils B. Weidmann, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz, 78457

Konstanz, Germany.

Email: nils.weidmann@uni-konstanz.de

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2020, Vol. 64(2-3) 373-401

ªThe Author(s) 2019

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0022002719861676

journals.sagepub.com/home/jcr

Keywords

cyberattacks, autocracy, Internet measurement, digital politics

As the importance and penetration of information and communication technology

(ICT) is rapidly increasing worldwide, it is not surprising that attacks on this infra-

structure have also increased steadily. One of the most common type of cyberattacks

are denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, which aim to interrupt the operation of servers

and websites by flooding them with data traffic. Many, if not most, of these attacks

have criminal intentions, for example, targeting companies for ransom. However,

DoS attacks are also used for political purposes. For instance, at the time of the

Russian election on December 4, 2011, many independent Russian news agencies

and opposition websites encountered DoS attacks when they published articles about

potential election fraud. At the same time, there were reports of DoS attacks on

government election bodies by activist groups, presumably as an attempt to protest

against election irregularities (Roberts and Etling 2011). These examples suggest

that DoS attacks can indeed be employed for political purposes, either as a tool of

censorship to silence the opposition or as a weapon of the weak against a mighty

government. Is this a systematic pattern? What types of political regimes are par-

ticularly prone to this type of digital attack? And how do political events affect their

occurrence?

So far, little is known about the politi cal use of DoS attacks. Some work in

political science studies cyberattacks (of which DoS att acks only constitute one

example) in interstate rivalries (Valeriano and Maness 2014). Asal et al. (2016 )

explore country-specific factors that lead to an increased frequency of politically

motivated DoS attacks. Most recently, Kostyuk and Zhukov (2019) investigate the

interplay between DoS attacks and battlefield events in Ukraine and Syria. While

this work tells us something about the international drivers of DoS attacks, we have

yet to examine the use of these attacks for domestic political purposes. As suggested

by our introductory examples (and several others we describe below), DoS attacks

have the potential to become a digital weapon of choice for governments but also

opposition activists. Moreover, existing resear ch has been limited to aggregated

country-level comparisons (which make it difficult to trace the dynamic relationship

between political events and the frequency of attacks) or studies with a country-

specific focus (which preclude insights into other cases beyond the one studied).

Our approach in this article is different. We analyze the use of DoS attacks for

domestic political purposes across almost all political regimes worldwide and trace

their occurrence at a high temporal resolution. In doing so, our focus is on election

periods as one of the main focal points of political contention. There is considerable

anecdotal evidence that cyberattacks occur frequently during election periods, espe-

cially in nondemocratic regimes (Freedom House 2017). Governments in these

countries have high incentiv es to use DoS attacks to censo r regime-threatening

374 Journal of Conflict Resolution 64(2-3)