A website that is used to display voting results in Knox County, Tennessee was taken down by DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service attack) that caused the disruption in elections. Although Mayor Tim Burchett said that no voting tallies have been affected by the attack.
“Although the crash did not affect the vote tallies or the integrity of the election, this is not something that should happen, I want to know what happened, and I think an independent review will help to determine that so we can move forward and work to prevent similar issues in the future.” – Mayor Burchett said.
The mayor further stated that they have hired IT security company Sword & Shield Enterprise to conduct a third-party security audit and analysis of the attack to determine what happened to the systems. A DDOS attack is hard to trace because of a lot of compromised IP addresses are in the pool which will be used in attacks like this, According to the initial analysis done by the company, Dick Moran, IT Director said that the attack was extremely heavy which caused the network to crash. He also said based on his experience it was highly suggestive of a Denial of Service attack.
The people are concerned with the disruptions caused in US elections with continuous attacks on the Election infrastructure of the US government. Candice Hoke, Co-founder of Centre of Cybersecurity and Privacy Protection said that there is a concern that actual votes can be changed with these attacks.
“Without a forensic evaluation, there’s no way for them to accurately conclude that ‘the crash did not affect the vote tallies or the integrity of the election, We do not know if only the web servers were impacted by the attack or if a broader impact occurred. It’s often the case that a DDOS attack is used as a distraction while another more insidious attack — such as on the tabulation servers — is occurring.” – Candice Hoke
The mayor said that the voting machines are not connected to the Internet hence we are not affected by the attack. He posted a reply to the Candice on Twitter.
Hey, @srl @HuffPost, how about you actually call Knox Co. to ask about our process? Your Ohio-based “expert” should have said: “Gee, I don’t know how their voting system works, so I shouldn’t comment” Lazy journalism. the voting system is never connected to the internet, never at risk.
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