So my lovely gfnd’s co-worker enrolled her pet Chihuahua into a contest to rate the dog against others of the same breed in the local area. Vaguely amused, I took a look at the web application and sure enough, it pretty much sucked. The developers had used a client side code in Flash to make it so that you couldn’t submit twice, but in re-loading the app you could (and that’s how the newbs in her office were cheating). I, however, looked at what data it was sending and sure enough I could send votes by bypassing the client side app entirely. I took the cheating to a whole new level.
So I gave the dog 100 votes just for good measure. My gfnd and her office mates were amused and asked me to up it to 1000. Sure, no sweat. The next closest Chihuahua was in the 50-60 range, which I found by writing a quick scanner to dump all the results for all the other dogs. So I figured we pretty much had this whole thing sewn up. With the 700 votes all of her co-workers had managed to generate, plus my 1000, we were an order of magnitude higher than the next competitor. I could see it already - my gfnd’s co-worker’s Chihuahua would be named Chihuahua supreme, there would be dancing in the streets, songs would be written…. The whole nine yards.
Little did I know how fierce this whole Chihuahua community is, and right before midnight on the night that the contest closed some other hacker did the exact same thing - but took the number one spot above my pick. Alas, had I checked the scores leading up to the closing moments of the contest my Chihuahua could have easily won that contest. I guess if I cared more about Chihuahua contests, I might have put more thought into it. But in the end it’s just another amusing story. Props go to whomever managed to out haXor my Chihuahua contest haXoring!
I think we all can see how similar high profile and more important contests (or elections) could be tampered with. Maybe Chihuahua contests don’t rank high on your visibility scale, nor mine typically, but despite the silly consequences of tampering with Chihuahua contests, it’s a small window into a much more dangerous issue. I hope everyone had a good 4th and Canada day!