Forest and Bird's Bird of the Year voting hacked - again

Friday, 5 October 2018

Attempting to hack the voting for Forest and Bird's Bird of the Year competition appears to becoming a yearly event.

This year, its the shag that's the centre of the dodgy vote scandal.

Forest and Bird revealed on Twitter that the shag received 310 'dubious' votes from an IP address in Australia.

A chart showing voting reveals the bird skyrocketing up the rankings.

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However, Forest and Bird had been expecting some dodgy dealings.

Voting is open for Bird of the Year 2018.

'We thought there might be another attempt to rig the voting so this year we brought in Dragonfly Data Science as independent scrutineers,' communications adviser Caitlin Carew said.

'We're just lucky that the awesome team at Dragonfly were so keen to help. They are watching the live data as it comes in and can identify and shut down any dodgy voting pretty fast.'

But whoever attempted the scam wasn't alone.

Forest and Bird released a list of 16 other birds on the list where people had tried to 'trick the system so far'.

'Those votes were all cast using disposable email addresses that are listed in public directories of known fake email addresses. We're not casting aspersions on the campaign teams themselves, but they clearly have some very passionate followers,' Carew said.

She had this message for people trying to game the system: 'Honestly, there are better ways to show your love for our native birds. And we're pretty confident nothing will get past our experts, so there's not much point trying.

'It's been an awesome first week for Bird of the Year, with a huge amount of social media chatter, plenty of hilarious memes, and heavy hitting celebrities such as Bill Bailey and Stephen Fry coming on board to endorse their favourite birds. And with ten days of voting still to go, anything could happen.'

So far Forest and Bird had 19,900 confirmed votes in the first four days - half of last year's vote total of 41,000.

'We've also had another 8000 unconfirmed votes - meaning people haven't clicked the confirmation link in their email. So we're reminding people to check their emails and confirm their vote, otherwise their vote won't count,' Carew said.

Last year, someone had a crack at lodging suspect votes for the white-faced heron.

Altogether 112 votes were found to have come from the one IP address, somewhere in the Christchurch area.

The white-faced heron fan used a random email generator, so all the votes came from different email addresses, Bird of the Year co-ordinator Kimberley Collins said at the time.

'We're not angry. We're just impressed they were able to do that and they care enough about a bird to do it,' she had said.

A similar attempt was made in 2015 when Bird of the Year was was briefly hijacked by a couple of over-zealous kōkako lovers who lodged hundreds of illegal votes from a hacked computer.

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