The computer database infrastructure of Sarasota County, Fla., was attacked by a notorious Internet worm on the first day of early voting during the 2006 election, which featured the now-contested U.S. House race between Democrat Christine Jennings and Republican Vern Buchanan in Florida's 13th Congressional district.

In the early afternoon hours on Monday, Oct. 23, 2006, an Internet worm slammed into the county's database system, breaching its firewall and overwriting the system's administrative password. The havoc brought the county's network -- and the electronic voting system which relies on it -- to its knees as Internet access was all but lost at voting locations for two hours that afternoon. Voters in one of the nation's most hotly contested Congressional elections were unable to cast ballots during the outage, since officials were unable to verify registration data.

http://tinyurl.com/yqyrra

Sarasota County officials claim that their election system network was not compromised, but there is reason to doubt them.

Here's what the Department of Homeland Security says about a hack of this type.

Compromise by the worm confirms a system is vulnerable to allowing a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code as the local SYSTEM user. It may be possible for an attacker to subsequently leverage a local privilege escalation exploit in order to gain Administrator access to the victim system.

Whether the hack was related to the latter problems is an open question, but we do know that Sarasota suffered extreme problems that were reported in both the early voting and regular voting period. Also, the paper based voting in the early period had an undervote of ~%2 while the electronic voting had an undervote of nearly %18.

The Sarasota incident report confirms that the attack succeeded in changing the administrator password for the county's database system.

When asked if such a worm sent to the system could be used to mask a more nefarious purpose, such as an attempt to hack into the voting system in some fashion, Logan acknowledge that "it's a possibility."

"That's how hackers would normally work," the security expert explained. "Get access to one machine to test the system to see how the rest of the system works."

But if hacking further into the system or planting a virus elsewhere was the hope, Logan believes that it's unlikely that the attack would have been successful. "Our network doesn't share copper or wire with the Supervisor of Elections' network. That's by design for exactly that reasoning," he told me.

The county official's claim that it's "unlikely" that the attack was successful is hardly reassuring given the massive problems that later developed. Bradblog has a long series on this subject, it begins with the latest post and goes all the way back to 2006.

http://www.bradblog.com/?cat=180

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