Officials are investigating a cyberattack that crashed the website displaying Knox County election results Tuesday night. Additionally, Knox County Mayor Tim Burchett on Wednesday said he has called for a cyber-security contractor to look into the server crash that shut down the county’s website just as polls closed on election night, according to a news release. … Sword & Shield Enterprise Security, a Knox County-based IT security firm, will conduct a root-cause analysis to determine the exact nature of the County server’s shut down, beginning today, the release said. IT Director Richard “Dick” Moran wrote that a preliminary review “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. Based on my experience, this was highly suggestive of a (denial of service) attack.
The county’s website was down for about an hour from 8 -9 p.m. before officials got it back up and running.
“Our Knox County IT team acted quickly in getting the site back up, and I appreciate their effort very much,” Mayor Burchett said.
Members of the public trying to track candidates’ election results while votes were being counted Tuesday night were met with “service unavailable” error messages.
Full Article: Knox County officials investigating election night cyberattack.