Text 17947, 60 rader
Skriven 2007-05-17 19:46:54 av mike (1:379/45)
Ärende: Worm attacked voter database in notorious Florida district
==================================================================
From: mike <mike@barkto.com>


http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&article
Id=9019560

===
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.

Remember Slammer?

An incident report filed by the county explains the intrusion and temporary
havoc wrought by the virus.

According to a two-page report examining an October 2006 outage, a server on
Sarasota County's database system was attacked by "a variant of the SQL Slammer
worm." Once infected, as the report details, the server "sent traffic to other
database servers on the Internet, and the traffic generated by the infected
server rendered the firewall unavailable."

In a separate document, titled "Conduct of Election Report, Sarasota County
General Election, November 7, 2006" there are two different Internet service
outages mentioned, though the viral attack described in the Sarasota County
database security team's report -- the attack that was presumably the source of
one of those outages -- is not described or even mentioned specifically in that
report. It's still unclear what the second incident referred to in that report
may be.

The SQL Slammer Worm, commonly known as Slammer, was discovered in 2002. In
January of 2003, when it was first triggered, the virus brought Internet
systems down across the world in a matter of minutes. Though most systems
vulnerable to the attack have since been patched by a fix provided by Microsoft
prior to the initial 2003 attack, the Sarasota County machine that was attacked
and subsequently spread an infection that overtook the network infrastructure
"was completely unpatched. Essentially it was missing five years’ worth of
security updates," according to the October 24, 2006, incident report.
===

While the above concerns me, the level of concern pales in relation to the
concern I have when I hear about Windows being used on naval ships that HAVE
GUNS.


 /m

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