![]() Their report, which was shared with Vox and reviewed by cybersecurity experts, confirmed that no data was stolen during the attack. Within days, Knox hired a third-party security consultant, called Sword and Shield, to conduct a forensic analysis. Like burglars who pull the fire alarm and, in the ensuing chaos, ransack the cash register, the hackers entered through a hole of their own creation, and briefly probed the county’s internal database. ![]() Like burglars who pull the fire alarm and, in the ensuing chaos, ransack the cash register, the hackers entered through a hole of their own creation. Long before election night, attackers had uncovered a vulnerability in Knox’s website - “loosely written code,” Ball called it - and they timed the onslaught perfectly so they could exploit it during the scramble. It wasn’t until next morning, as IT staff began combing through server logs, that they discovered the true purpose of the attack: The DDOS, and the all-hands effort required to fight it, had been a diversion. But then the attack came roaring back throughout the night, Ball’s team would battle it to the hilt. But it was natural for voters to wonder if the integrity of the vote itself had come under threat: “It’s the first question they asked me,” Rodgers said.Īfter an hour, Ball’s team managed to bring the server back to life finally, the results became visible. Rodgers would later explain to the media that the online precinct tally is unofficial: Attacking it can’t change the vote count, any more than hacking basketball scores on can change the actual winner of the NBA finals. I’ve never had three TV crews at one time,” Rodgers said, recounting how the chaos unspooled. One of them was Cliff Rodgers, the Knox County administrator of elections, who was deliberating what he should tell the local media. Finally, the barrage intensified so much that after 15 minutes, the server succumbed and crashed.īall was now besieged by callers - local politicos, voters, county staff. The assault was being launched from 65 countries, a legion of zombie computers pressed into service by the attack’s architects. One county technician, dumbfounded by the whoosh of code rocketing across the screen, somberly took out his phone and began to film it. Over at the county’s IT center, “the error logs were coming so fast that you couldn’t even see what anything said,” recalled Ball. Technicians recognized the attack: a distributed denial of service, or DDOS, in which a server is overwhelmed by a crushing wave of requests, slowing it to a halt. “Looks like a DDOS.” Ball still remembers his next, involuntary exclamation: “Oh, shit.” It was a message from a staffer, still on duty at the IT department: “We’ve got a problem here,” it read. It read simply, “Service Unavailable.” Across East Tennessee, thousands of Knox County residents who eagerly awaited the results saw the same error message - including at the late-night election parties for various county candidates, where supporters gathered around computers at Knoxville’s Crowne Plaza Hotel and the nearby Clarion Inn and Suites.īall was scowling at the screen when the phone on his table buzzed. Staring back at Ball was a proxy error notice, a gray message plastered against a screen of purgatorial white. Curious, Ball typed in the address for the Knox County election website.Īt 7:53, the website abruptly crashed. In a few minutes, at exactly 8 pm, the county’s incoming precinct results would become visible to the public online. Ball’s IT staff had finished a 14-hour day, running dress rehearsals to prepare for the ritual chaos of election night. “The congress will thoroughly review the international and domestic situations, comprehensively grasp the new requirements for the development of the cause of the Party and the country on the new journey in the new era, as well as the new expectations of the people,” it said.One evening last May in Knoxville, Tennessee, during the night of the local primary election, Dave Ball, the assistant IT director for Knox County, settled into the Naugahyde chair of his dusty home office and punched away at his desktop computer. The congress is “of great significance to be convened at a crucial moment, as the whole Party and the entire nation embark on a new journey toward building a modern socialist country in all respects, and advance toward the Second Centenary Goal,” Xinhua said, referring to a long-standing economic development target. ![]() ![]() The official Xinhua News Agency said the date of the congress was announced Tuesday at a meeting of the party’s Politburo. Xi’s accumulation of power has drawn comparison’s to former dictator Mao Zedong, with his political theories written into the constitution and his cultivation of a cult of personality superseding all other current top Chinese officials. ![]() Witness recalls harrowing moment of Seoul crowd surge ![]()
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