The end of 2023 saw an uptick in distributed denial-of-service traffic across major industries in Bangladesh, and it may have been geared to disrupt the latest national elections.
Last week, it came to light that a mobile app providing critical information to Bangladeshi voters ahead of those elections was targeted by cyberattackers.
As Dark Reading reported at the time, the Bangladeshi Election Commission claimed it was one of the latest victims of a DDoS attack.
It turns out, the disruption effort could have been part of a much more widespread campaign to meddle with the national vote.
According to exclusive data provided to Dark Reading by Cloudflare, the end of 2023 in Bangladesh, running up to the vote, saw a 33% quarter-over-quarter jump in HTTP DDoS attack traffic.
More than half of that was directed at the telecommunications industry, with the rest spread among other crucial sectors; media and newspapers was the next most-targeted industry, with banking, financial services, and insurance following closely behind.
The Smart Election app remained live throughout Election Day on Jan. 7, in which the incumbent prime minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed won her fourth straight term.
Voters reported performance issues, including slowdowns, according to reporting by the Dhaka Tribune.
Mohammed Jahangir Alam, secretary of the Bangladesh Election Commission announced that the app had been struck by a cyberattack.
He claimed the bad traffic originated in Germany and Ukraine.
The origination data often provides clues as to the motivations and actors behind politically motivated hacks - though there's no obvious geopolitical tension that would explain why Western European or Ukrainian assailants would be involved in the politics of Bangladesh.
According to Cloudflare data, Bangladesh's DDoS problem is well dispersed.
Around 15% of Q4 2023 attack traffic came from the US, and 9% from Indonesia, with Brazil, Japan, India, Germany, and Russia following behind with around 4-5% apiece.
Dark Reading reached out to the office of the Bangladesh Election Commission Secretary for further evidence to support Alam's assertion, but did not receive a reply by the time of publishing.
That said, DDoS might be a bigger player in global elections from now on than it has been, according to Cloudflare.
This Cyber News was published on www.darkreading.com. Publication date: Thu, 18 Jan 2024 17:20:03 +0000