This article is for information purposes only so you can understand how this happens. This is not a guide to encourage you to do this yourself. I do not recommend any unethical hacking or poll influencing like this. What I describe here is just one of many ways to hack polling.
Have you noticed how some online web polls seem to be highly slanted one way or another within minute of opening and every time you check the results, it seems to have received tens or hundreds of thousands more votes within minutes? Do that many people really rush to click on an online poll as soon as it opens?
While yes, some polls may be popular, seeing tens or hundreds of thousands of votes within minutes all in one direction is often an indication that the poll has been hacked or ‘influenced’. There is a reason why online polls are not scientific and should not be used to judge real results. In the marketing world, especially in politics, online polls are created to drive influence or create a story, not to reflect opinion.
One may think that it would take a crack team of hackers with a lot of technology to influence a poll to this level. You would be wrong. Even sitting at your computer now you could make your single vote count 3, 4, or even 10 times over simply by answering the poll on multiple browsers and multiple devices. It is almost as easy, however, to generate thousands upon thousands of votes a minute off one PC understanding some basic concepts and using free apps and features already found in your computer.
First, one should understand how online polls work and how they try to keep people from voting multiple times.
When you vote in an online poll, the website you are on will track your session a couple of ways. One is storing a session cookie on your computer. Just a little piece of data that tells that website you’ve been there. The other way is to track your IP address and browser data. When you go to the poll again, it uses this cookie and/or data to determine if you’ve voted before and it will not let you vote again and often just show you the results.
The key to hacking a poll is to trick the website that you haven’t voted before, and then reproduce the process rapidly. This can be accomplished with a 4 step process:
1. Download an IP rotating tool like the AnonymousX plugin for Firefox. This free tool will change your IP address every time it is activated, essentially masking your computer.
2. Download a macro recording tool like JitBit Macro Recorder. This tool will record all of the keystrokes and mouse actions on your computer and allow you to play them back, in other words, automatically repeat what you just did with a click of a button , or it can be set to automatically repeat the process.
3. While the macro recorder is on, click AnonymousX to change your IP, open the poll link, vote in the poll, clear your history, refresh the poll page. You now have a recording of your voting that can be reproduced.
4. Set the macro to auto-play for a certain amount of time, at a certain rate (this you may need to fine tune to work best with your connection speed and the website you are voting on) and run the macro.
Doing this process, a layperson with one computer can generate hundreds of votes per minute on most web polls. A professional, however, using multiple computers and beefed up software, could easily generate thousands of votes per minute or more. There are services available for a few Bitcoins that offer to guarantee tens of thousands of poll votes. The more Bitcoins you send them, the more they can offer, the sky’s the limit.
This does not take any special training or coding knowledge. The steps I’ve shown here can be set up and going by anyone with even the most basic computer knowledge, in minutes.
So next time you see odd results on a poll, remember how easy it is to manipulate thousands to tens of thousands of votes quickly.
