First published: 24th October 2012
In August 2012, TVB, the organisers the Miss Hong Kong beauty pageant, initially blamed the collapse of the online voting system for the contest on unknown hackers. This newsletter reported reported on the fiasco and quoted security consultants Allan Dyer and Richard Stagg speculating wildly about the possible causes. They agreed that the most probable scenario was incompetence, a failure of capacity planning.
TVB has now released the results of an investigation by PwC into the incident, saying that they found no evidence of hacking and that the number of transactions due to voting activity between 22:02 and 23:02 far exceeded the predefined hourly limit of 12.8 million transactions, resulting in system paralysis.