https://www.vox.com/2018/10/25/18001684/2018-midterms-hacked-russia-election-security-voting
By Benjamin Wofford
Vox.com
Oct 25, 2018
One evening last May in Knoxville, Tennessee, during the night of the
local primary election, Dave Ball, the assistant IT director for Knox
County, settled into the Naugahyde chair of his dusty home office and
punched away at his desktop computer. Ball's IT staff had finished a
14-hour day, running dress rehearsals to prepare for the ritual chaos of
election night.
In a few minutes, at exactly 8 pm, the county's incoming precinct results
would become visible to the public online. Curious, Ball typed in the
address for the Knox County election website.
At 7:53, the website abruptly crashed. Staring back at Ball was a proxy
error notice, a gray message plastered against a screen of purgatorial
white. It read simply, "Service Unavailable." Across East Tennessee,
thousands of Knox County residents who eagerly awaited the results saw the
same error message -- including at the late-night election parties for
various county candidates, where supporters gathered around computers at
Knoxville’s Crowne Plaza Hotel and the nearby Clarion Inn and Suites.
Ball was scowling at the screen when the phone on his table buzzed. It was
a message from a staffer, still on duty at the IT department: "We've got a
problem here," it read. "Looks like a DDOS." Ball still remembers his
next, involuntary exclamation: "Oh, shit."
[...]
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