This opens up a can of Worms .. pun intended
I smell a RAT .. not just a worm.
Florida must have some kind of different environment where coincidences are more probable. Or some really piss-poor IT people.
Internet Worm Hit Florida Election Database
"The computer database infrastructure of Sarasota County, Fla., was attacked by a notorious Internet worm on the first day of early voting during the 2006 election, which featured the now-contested U.S. House race between Democrat Christine Jennings and Republican Vern Buchanan in Florida's 13th Congressional district.
....Oct. 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, since officials were unable to verify registration data.
....The panel was commissioned to investigate the still unexplained, extraordinarily high number of reports of votes that were cast but unrecorded by the touch-screen systems in the District 13 Congressional race."
Well well .. don't tell me the worm only erased Democrat names. Or erased all the voters in a heavily black district .. seein' how most blacks are Democrats.
The 'Slammer Worm' was discovered in 2002--they wanted to call it Karl Rove but he declined--everyone fixed it with a patch. Everyone except the Sarasota County voter data people. So Slammer then spread an infection that overtook the network on voting day. BTW-- it was missing five years' worth of security updates. On voting day.
How many times have we heard that only crazy people think the Republicans stole the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. Crazy people and computer experts, that is. ;-)
If no partisan shennanigans were involved, okay, glad to hear it. Some people are saying that the Florida government is just too damn dumb to be able to foresee this happening and take the necessary steps to prevent it.
But not Jeb Bush .. right before the 2004 election Jeb publicly expressed confidence in the electronic machines while privately telling Republicans to use absentee ballots to "ensure" their vote is counted.
We all know that if a worm can be sent to a system for nefarious reasons .. it will be. Eventually.
Yes, just the fact that a worm CAN enter a system so easily--allowing a remote attacker to take control as the local system user--is enough to make me thankful that in my state we still mark a ballot with a pencil. Yep, old fashioned I know .. and we put the paper ballots in a big box which is opened in a big room on a big table and both political parties witness the counting.
Yeah, I know .. fraud can happen there too .. just not as much, and on a much smaller scale.
