Ask HN: Checking if a website is down intentionally (Venezuelan elections)

[jipl104]

I’m trying to investigate if a website has been made unavailable intentionally. http://www.cne.gob.ve/

Context: this is the website of the Venezuelan electoral commission. It has been unavailable for three days, since the polls closed on Sunday (how convenient!). The commission announced a winner but has yet to publish the full results of the election. The government claims that the website is being attacked, and therefore can’t publish the results.

The site has been unavailable for 3 days, it times out with no response. Doing a ping/traceroute returns “cannot resolve http://www.cne.gob.ve/: Unknown host”, but the domain appears registered correctly and active.

Doing an NSLookup shows that www.cne.gob.ve is redirecting to www.gslb.cne.gob.ve. That last domain returns no records. Checking the WHOIS history, it looks like the domain was updated today https://whois-history.whoisxmlapi.com/lookup-report/A9Rzen9Kk6

Is there anything else I could look into?

Thank you!

[lobocinza]

The government controls the .ve namespace. If it is a domain name issue then it was intentional unless there's evidence of all .ve domains being compromised.

[Bluestein]

Hanlon's razor is applicable here, methinks.-

[lobocinza]

I disagree because the context is a flagrant election fraud by a government that is well-know to be malicious.

[Bluestein]

Oh, indeed. And incompetent.-