Worm attacked voter database in notorious Florida district

Brad Friedman

May 16, 2007

(Computerworld) Sarasota County, Florida's computer database infrastructure was attacked by a notorious Internet worm on the first day of early voting during the 2006 election featuring the now-contested U.S. House race in Florida's 13th Congressional district between Christine Jennings (D) and Vern Buchanan (R).

In the early afternoon hours on Monday, October 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 as officials were unable to verify registration data.