Time Magazine should know better than to use a website poll to have users determine the most influential person of 2009. Polls are often susceptible to a number of automated attacks or simply a swarm of pranksters with too much time on their hands.
In this case, the poll padding came from the massive imageboard website, 4chan.org. Notorious for generating internet memes and fueling internet subculture, this is not the first internet attack to originate from the unmonitored site.
The voting link to Time’s most influential person poll was a simple URL that was redistributed by 4chan users through legitimate sites and content spamming. By using cross-site request forgery, unwitting and trusting website users clicked the voting link. At the same time, they were able to vote down other entries because the poll did not check if the rank in voting was legal.
Time fought back by adding a salted and hashed key that ensured votes were submitted from its own poll form. But 4chan found the authentication key was on the client by the poll’s flash application and bypassed this protection.
The poll also had anti-automation protection by making a user from the same IP address wait 13 seconds between each vote. 4chan created auto-voting robots that vote for every 13 seconds while voting down competing entries while waiting during the other 12.
All this allowed for “moot” to skyrocket to the top of the poll. But not content to merely take the top place, 4chan hackers continued to manipulate the poll rankings. They reordered the rankings so that the first letter of each name would spell out the acrostic “Marblecake Also the Game.”
If you did not already know, “moot” is supposedly the identity of the mysterious creator of 4chan. Although because of the intentional disorganization on the site, it is impossible to determine any truthful information about the user.
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