DDoS Attack Foils Beauty Pageant and Denies Voter Prize

The Miss Hong Kong beauty pageant took a wrong turn as an alleged DDoS attack on the online voting system forced a local broadcaster to empower a panel of judges to pick the winner. Voters were even more put out because a randomly selected individual was supposed to win a Mini Cooper.

However, another contest will be announced in the next two weeks, and everyone will once again have the chance to win the car, said TVB’s deputy director for foreign affairs Tsang Sing-ming.

An independent consultant will be asked to audit the attack that occurred on Microsoft`s Azure platform, although the company says that no harm came to their cloud product.

“From the findings of the initial investigation, our engineers identified some unusual data traffic targeting the TVB fun application in the operating records of the related voting system,“ said Microsoft. “We therefore have grounds to suspect that the application was attacked by malicious hackers, causing abnormal disruption in the operation of the application and thus the subsequent uploading of related data to the cloud system for further processing.“

Although Tracy Chu Chin-suet was the public favorite, she came in second after Cheung Ming-nga was awarded first prize and the chance to compete in the Miss World competition next year. “I think I would still have won,” said Cheung Ming-nga, while Tracy Chu Chin-suet believes that the judge`s ruling was fair.