Bots may be trumping online polls

Politicians are fond of saying that the only poll that matters is the one on election day.

That may be especially true this year, especially when it comes to online polls that, like anything in the digital, connected world, are vulnerable to mischief.

The mischief is enabled by bots – hundreds to many thousands of computers under the control of an attacker that are more typically used to send out spam, create Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and commit various kinds of fraud – but in this case are used to skew poll results. They can make it look like public opinion views one candidate as the winner of a debate when the real vote would show the other candidate did.

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