Officials of the Knox County Election Commission Website have officially disclosed that their website crashed on Tuesday night at around 8 pm due to a cyber attack. But also declared that none of the County’s election results were either affected or influenced by the attack.
A media update released early on Wednesday says that the attack experienced by Knox County election website was a distributed denial of service attack.
Note- Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) or shortly known as a denial of service attack is an online attempt to disrupt a website or database by overloading it with tons of fake computer traffic.
According to the sources reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders, the website went offline at 8 PM in the night on Tuesday but was brought back to life by 9:30 PM. The one and half hour long disruption prevented the public from viewing the winning process of probable of the primary elections which include Mayoral race and the Chair of the County Sheriff.
As per the update was given by Richard Moran, the IT director of the County, the attack did not disrupt the website on a permanent note. But preventing the officials from displaying the election results to the public for about an hour.
Moran added in his statement that there is no way to prepare for such attacks and admitted that he and his staff can do nothing when someone from outside come to the website.
Currently, the attack is being probed by 11 security experts who have ruled out the role of a state-funded cyber attack on Knox County Election 2018 for now.
However, an official announcement on this note is awaited and can only be expected after the investigation gets fully completed.
Note- Knox County is a small country town in US State of Tennessee with a population of over 432,000. Knoxville happens to be the County Seat of Tennessee
