In the wake of highly controversial elections that were narrowly won by Malaysia’s ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition, evidence is emerging that the government there employed tried and tested internet ‘bullying’ tactics in a bid to silence the opposition and manipulate the vote.

Sunday’s election was billed as the most hotly contested vote in Malaysia’s history, with the BN facing the most serious challenge yet to its 55-year rule from the People’s Alliance coalition. Yet as Malaysia’s citizens headed out to the polls, the country saw a wave of attacks and blocks strike opposition and independent media sites.

Whoever was behind these actions relied on a combination of Distributed Denial of Service DDoS attacks and ISP blocking in order to prevent Malaysia’s voters from accessing opposition viewpoints. Most common were the DDoS attacks, which as The Verge points out, has become a standard technique of repressive governments looking to for ways to block criticism of them. Meanwhile, Reuters further reports that CloudFlare, the DDoS mitigation service, saw a number of such attacks against Malaysian news sites over the last week, with the majority of them originating from inside the country.

Even more blatant were the reported ISP blocks in the country. A detailed report by Access Now, which calls itself a global defender of digital rights, reveals that at least five of Malaysia’s biggest ISPs were involved in the censorship, specifically Unifi, TM, Celcom, Digi, and Maxis. These ISPs allegedly began refusing to serve requests to certain websites over the past week, thus rendering them inaccessible. Unsurprisingly the ISPs received a barrage of complaints from customers, forcing them to change tactics slightly and block specified pages within those blocked domains. Even worse, in some cases the ISPs attempted to hide what they are doing, as in the case of certain YouTube videos critical of the BN, where the blocks targeted the actual video stream as opposed to the page itself.

Other sites to be blocked included the Facebook and Twitter pages of opposition parties and candidates. Access Now suggests that the ruling BN coalition was almost certainly behind these attacks, which they likely achieved with the help of ISPs using a deep packet inspection technique.

Sadly it would seem that blocking access to websites isn’t the only way in which Malaysia’s government has used the internet to silence the opposition. Access Now reports that there were a spate of arrests targeting anti-government bloggers in the weeks leading up to the elections. It also notes that Malaysia is one of several questionable regimes that employs the sinister FinSpy surveillance software, which is capable of hijacking computers and accessing all of their data, recording keystrokes, turning on web cameras and microphones, spying on Skype conversations and monitoring just about every other activity performed on on an infected machine. Moreover, as we saw last week, Malaysia appears to have been trying to infect as many machines with FinSpy as it possibly could in the run-up to the elections. A report from the CitizenLab published last week revealed that Malay language speakers were being targeted with a rogue version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser that contained the spyware, in an effort to trick users into downloading it.

The results of Malaysia’s election filtered through earlier today, and to some surprise the Barisan Nasional secured a total of 133 out of the 222 parliamentary seats, giving it a comfortable victory over the opposition People’s Alliance. Opposition candidate Anwar Ibrahim immediately declared that the election had been stolen, saying that the vote was marred by dozens of instances of fraud.

It’s difficult to say how much of an impact the government’s web censorship may have had on these results. Yet the fact that it managed to win the election so convincingly, despite everyone expecting this to be the closest-fought battle in Malaysia’s history, suggests that these repressive measures did little to hurt its chances of winning.