Florida County's Main Database System Breached On First Day Of Voting - No Security Patches In 5 Yea [View All]

[matcom]

<snip>

New concerns about the accuracy of electronic voting in Sarasota County, Florida are being raised after a published report documented how the county's main database system came under attack from a virulent worm. The county server was breached on the first day of early voting in the 2006 election, which included a now-disputed race for a seat in the US House of Representatives.

The attack code was a variant of the infamous Slammer worm that penetrated the county's server, which unbelievably, was missing five years worth of security patches, according to an article painstakingly reported by investigative journalist Brad Friedman. The breach crippled the county's entire network, including the electronic voting system, where net connectivity was disrupted for two hours. Those trying to vote during the outage were turned away.

The worm breached the database server's firewall and overwrote the system's administrative passwords. The server then "sent traffic to other database servers on the Internet, and the traffic generated by the infected server rendered the firewall unavailable," according to a two-page incident report unearthed by Friedman. A network security specialist who helped draft the report said he believed the harm to the county's election systems was limited to the two-hour disruption, because the two networks were not connected. (The specialist conceded that the timing of the attack, on the first day of early voting, "would make somebody raise an eyebrow" in suspecting the election system was being targeted.)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/17/sarasota_county_network_breached/