At Home and Abroad: The Use of Denial-of-service Attacks during Elections in Nondemocratic Regimes
Open accessAbstract
In this article, we study the political use of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, a particular 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.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Denial-of-service attacks provide a relatively cheap way of censoring information where automated control cannot be implemented easily.
“In addition to these refined techniques, so-called denial-of-service attacks provide a relatively cheap way of censoring information where automated control cannot be implemented easily.”
From How Dictators Control the Internet: A Review Essay (2020) · cites this paper as Lutscher et al., 2020
Denial-of-service attacks take down a website by swamping the hosting server with requests until it cannot be reached.
“These attacks take down a website by swamping the hosting server with requests up until the point that it cannot be reached anymore (Lutscher etal., 2020; Nazario, 2009; H. Roberts etal., 2012).”
From How Dictators Control the Internet: A Review Essay (2020) · cites this paper as Lutscher et al., 2020
The timing of censorship during a coup is consistent with many studies that have shown that Internet censorship is targeted during sensitive political time periods and periods of potential power transitions, such as elections and large-scale protests.
“First, the timing of censorship during a coup is consistent with many studies that have shown that Internet censorship is targeted during sensitive political time periods and periods of potential power transitions, such as elections and large-scale protests [23,25,44,47,73].”
From A multi-perspective view of Internet censorship in Myanmar (2021) · cites this paper as [47]
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 55 · Cited by 50
Research works printed but not linked: 8
- Beyer, Jessica L. 2014. Expect Us: Online Communities and Political Mobilization. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
- Enikolopov, Ruben, Alexey Makarin, and Maria Petrova. 2018. "Social Media and Protest Participation: Evidence from Russia." Working Paper. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn. com/abstract=2696236.
- Greene, William H. 2011. Econometric Analysis, Vol. 7. London, UK: Pearson.
- Lindberg, Steffan I. 2009. Democratization by Election: A New Mode of Transition. Balti- more, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Marczak, Bill, Nicholas Weaver, Jakub Dalek, Roya Ensafi, David Fifield, Sarah McKune, Arn Rey, et al. 2015. "An Analysis of China's 'Great Cannon'." In Proceedings of the 5th USENIX FOCI Workshop. Washington, DC: USENIX Association.
- Roberts, Margaret E. 2018. Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside Chinas Great Fire- wall. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
- Scott, Will, Thomas Anderson, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Arvind Krishnamurthy. 2016. "Satellite: Joint Analysis of CDNs and Network-level Interference." In 2016 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC), Denver: USENIX Association.
- Zuckerman, Ethan, Hal Roberts, Ryan McGrady, Jillian York, and John Palfrey. 2010. Dis- tributed Denial of Service Attacks Against Independent Media and Human Rights Sites. Cambridge, MA: The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University.
- Authors
- Lutscher, P. M., Weidmann, N. B., Roberts, M. E., Jonker, M., King, A., & Dainotti, A.
- Affiliations
- University of Konstanz (DE)
- University of California San Diego (US)
- University of Twente (NL)
- San Diego Supercomputer Center (US)
- Corresponding author
- Weidmann, Nils B.
- Venue
- Journal of Conflict Resolution
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2019-07-25
- Volume
- 64
- Issue
- 2-3
- Pages
- 373-401
- ISSN
- 0022-0027 (ISSN-L)
- 1552-8766
- OpenAlex
- W2964277065
- Cited by
- 50
- References
- 55
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 19 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 2
- FWCI
- 17.98
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Locations
- Journal of Conflict Resolution (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- University of Twente Research Information (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- KOPS (University of Konstanz) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- Funders
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (402127652)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Cybersecurity and Cyber Warfare Studies
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Political Conflict and Governance
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Keywords
- denial-of-service attacks, election interference, authoritarian regimes, cyberattacks, internet censorship, political activism, Internet traffic measurement, news websites
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
