Some guy named Brad Friedman has a breaking exclusive over at ComputerWorld on the contested FL-13 election between Christine Jennings (D) and Vern Buchanan (R).
As Friedman’s brilliant reportage reveals, previously unreleased documents show that Sarasota County’s database network was hit by a viral worm attack on the first day of Early Voting last year. The attack, by a variant of the SQL Slammer Worm, wrought havoc on the system, bringing it to its knees for about two hours on that first afternoon of voting, leaving voters at precincts unable to cast their votes.
Details about further damage which may have occurred during, or in the wake of, the successful hack remain unclear. Whether or not the ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting machines — which failed to record the selections of some 18,000 voters in the election decided by just 369 votes — or the central tabulator used in that FL-13 race were directly affected is unknown for certain. The security specialist who filed the incident report, interviewed by Friedman, acknowledges that “it’s a possibility,” though he believes the damage was contained and didn’t spread to the Elections Supervisor’s network infrastructure.
Also unclear is whether or not the viral attack and the report which documented it were disclosed in the discovery process to the plaintiff’s attorneys who are challenging the election in state court and in the U.S. House. It doesn’t seem so.
See more in Friedman’s compelling exclusive over there, which includes a PDF of the previously undisclosed incident report describing what happened as the worm slammed an unprotected county server (which had been five years behind in security patch updates), spread throughout the system, breached the firewall, rewrote administrative passwords, and brought voting to a halt in Sarasota on October 23, 2006, the first day of Early Voting. An interestingly timed attack to say the least.
As CW only links to a PDF version of the two-page incident report, we’ll be kind enough to include a graphic version of both pages below.
The previously undisclosed two-page incident report, as filed by the Sarasota County network security team, housed in the county’s Suncoast Technology Center, follows in full…
NOTE: The incident occurred on 10/23/06 and the incident report was filed on 10/24/06. The second reference to the incident date as “10/14/06” is a typo, as confirmed by Sarasota County Information Security Analyst Hal Logan, a member of the team which filed the report. A PDF version of the following is available here.
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Brad Friedman is an investigative journalist, blogger, proprietor of The BRAD BLOG, and an authority on issues related to American election integrity.
So the system was connected to the Internet even though it was not supposed to be. And who owns the addresses to which that traffic was flowing? Does anyone know?
Wow..I think I’ve heard of that Freidman guy somewhere before…
Good work Brad. Now what?
Were these ES&S iVotronic? Because that’s what WE have here where I live!
Some lawyers should be fined heavily or even disbarred for failing to turn over this evidence during discovery.
But, then again, Rethuglicans don’t play by the same set of rules as the rest of us. For them, lying, cheating, stealing, and breaking any US or international law is perfectly OK.
I’m not saying you must join the Democratic Party (or the Democrat Party as you Rethuglicans like to call it) but any HONEST and REASONABLE American who is still a member of the Rethuglican party — WHAT’S YOUR EXCUSE?
These people should all be arrested, tried, convicted, and jailed for life without the possibility of parole IN CHINA.
The date of the incident was 10/24/2006. Did they just release this information now?
It says the Admins and DBA’s scanned for irregularities. Were they the same people who were responsible for keeping the server patches up to date?
HOLY WHA…! CHANGED PASSWORDS? FLOODED FIREWALLS? Brad–am I wrong in assuming that finally, now, this should be more than enough to:
a) Subpoena/ indict ES&S, Ciber, Inc., and state officials in election fraud?
b) Wake up our Comatose Congress and ELECTRIFY the GAO’s current FL-13 investigation (do they have this info, Brad?)
c) Get Dent gone/ or even, ironically, exonerate Dent?
Despite my obsession with seeing S.O.E. Kathy Dent held accountable for so many of her blatant lies/ her repeated and deliberate obstruction of the voters’ will (I have witnessed so many of these firsthand that I have, at times, wanted to scratch out my eyes from the sulfur burning.) As much as I want her removed, I often wonder how much of this she was privy to…
(INTERESTING SIDE NOTE: At the Tallahassee hearings, I overheard something from the table of ES&S attorneys that struck me, something like: “If only she had reset the damn dates…” ???
My guess is that prior to this, they were grooming her, much like they did Katherine Harris, for some powerful partisan post (did you know Dent is concurrently serving as the PRESIDENT of the Florida State Supervisor of Elections Board, by the way?)–and this scandal just killed it. Now I’m betting she’s gonna be their fall guy du jour…UNLESS this stunning information can prove she was only a marginal figure in this treason…
Wow. That would be the greatest, Grandest-Daddy Dandy twist of all
time! Thanks a million for this nifty, Brad!
(RELATED: Link to new study from Florida Fair Election Coalition/ KITTY GARBER’s stunning report of undervote rates from ES&S’s IVotronic machines in Florida’s 2006 Elections:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EQBNCYpHyo
full report can be found @ VOTETRUSTUSA (ofcourse)
http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2383&Itemid=113)
Even if I disagree with a mere 99.9% of everything else you post, I fully agree with you here. Keep it up.
How do you do it,..
catching them at their election criminality ?
It is like a magician pulling bunnies from a top hat.
The “brilliant” Mr. Friedman either doesn’t know the difference in an election system and a voting system or just doesn’t care. I’d also like to know how many precincts or polling places were open on October 23rd. Other than skipping through the facts, the servers at the ROV haven’t shown signs of infection yet in this continuing example of classic yellow journalism it is “unclear” anything happened to a voting system which isn’t connected to the county network. Good job.
How about saving your indignation on something that is real and not the brilliance that is the author of this blog?
Howdy Howdy! –
First, thanks for noticing my brilliance!
Next, please feel free to elucidate on your cryptic concerns about my not knowing or caring about the diff between an “election system and a voting system.” Since you didn’t mention what that has do with anything I wrote here, and as I don’t believe I used either phrase in the above article, I have no idea what you’re referring to.
If you read the complete article at ComputerWorld, you will have seen that the most notable concern was whether or not the information was disclosed via the discovery process to the plaintiffs in the case, or whehter, like so much else in this matter (the “smoothing filter” warning for example), this too was kept a secret by Kathy Dent. As it wasn’t mentioned in her “Conduct of Elections Report” it seems that is indeed the case.
Beyond that, thanks for your suggestion on what I should save my indignation for. Right now, I’m using it for the fight to restore Democracy to America. What are you saving yours for? Your defense in court after charges are brought up in Santa Cruz?
Howdy:
It’s not “OK” that a virus was able to stop voting! It’s “OK”, because it was early voting? Tell that to the early voters!
On our local talk radio station, people were calling in and saying they showed up to vote YESTERDAY (not “early voting), and the e-vote machines weren’t working, so they didn’t get to vote, and they set aside the time to vote and couldn’t return later.
GET RID OF THEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Re: Comment #6 Thanks Jeannie Dean for your activism and also for posting the link to Kitty and Susan on The Edge–I just found this myself on You Tube and it is very damning–undervotes weren’t just occurring in Sarasota, as you point out, but everywhere! And op-scans were not exonerated in this, either!
Related to this is Clint Curtis’s case in CD #24–why on earth can’t he gain traction in Congress with this? The evidence collected via sworn affidavits is astonishing proof of a corrupted election there!
Carol #12:
“Related to this is Clint Curtis’s case in CD #24–why on earth can’t he gain traction in Congress with this? The evidence collected via sworn affidavits is astonishing proof of a corrupted election there! ‘
I think it may be because the opinion of the voters as to how they “voted” now and forever after pales in comparison to the opinion of the Con-puters as to how the “voters” voted.
What? … the FL-13 faith based machines vulnerable? Oh how my faith hurts at hearing this … wait … wait … there we go, ah… I feel better now … just poured a little denial on it … and now … ummmm … what were those conspiracy nuts complaining about?
Carol #12:
“I think it may be because the opinion of the voters as to how they “voted” now and forever after pales in comparison to the opinion of the Con-puters as to how the ‘voters’ voted.”
I suspect that it is because, deep down inside, Congress members are status-seeking cowards who prefer to let bullies walk all over them to standing up for what is right.
Some guy named Brad Friedman has a breaking exclusive over at ComputerWorld…
Brad Friedman? Never heard of ‘im.
– Tom 😉
Isn’t Fla. going to be an early primary state for dems? Wonder if they’ll have time to “fix’ the machines before then. I’m seeing corporate Hill with high approval numbers in the polls and nobody wildly cheering for her out campaigning. Never heard anybody say they like her either.