In a troubling denial-of-service (DDoS) attack this week, the website of a county election commission in Tennessee went offline during a mayoral primary.
Knox County reported that despite the disruption, “The cyber-attack did not impact the results of the election.”
Knox County wrote on Twitter on Tuesday saying, “Tonight, our web servers suffered a successful denial-of-service attack. Election results were not affected, as our election machines are never connected to the internet.”
Even though the hack did not affect the results of the election, the county is looking for answers. Knox County Mayor, Tim Burchett says that he wants to find out what happened so that he can prevent future attacks and other such incidents from happening again.
Burchett said in a statement, “Although the crash did not affect the vote tallies or the integrity of the election, this is not something that should happen.”
He further added saying, ““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.”
Knox County’s IT Director Dick Moran claims in a preliminary report that it had been, “Noted that extremely heavy and abnormal network traffic was originating from numerous IP addresses associated with numerous geographic locations, both internal and external to this country.”
In March, cyber-criminals manage to break into the dispatch system of Baltimore that supports emergency calls. That hack came a week after Atlanta experienced a “ransom-ware” attack which affected city services which included bill collections, airport Wi-Fi and even the Municipal Court.
Lisa Bender, spokeswomen for the department did not specify the impacts of the attack at the time but instead claimed that the department has had to complete some tasks offline.
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