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Government
Cincinnati.Com Government
Last Updated: 9:40 am | Thursday, May 6, 2010
Digital elections attack in sheriff's hands
By Sheila McLaughlin smclaughlin@enquirer.com May 6, 2010
HAMILTON - A digital attack that swamped and crashed the Butler County Board of Elections web site Tuesday night as ballots were being tabulated is now the subject of a criminal investigation.
Elections officials turned their findings over to sheriff's detectives Thursday while they offered assurances that the integrity of the county elections process was still intact.
At the same time, the county's director of information services said he is evaluating the county's web servers and web sites to determine if they are secure.
The police investigation could take three months or more, sheriff's Lt. Mike Craft said.
"Sheriff (Rick) Jones has made it very clear that anyone that would jeopardize the integrity of the county computer system or attempt anything with the board of elections, he takes it very serious and is committed to any resources we need to resolve this whether it is something that is accidental or something that was intentional," Craft said.
Elections Director Betty McGary said the problem that crashed three servers also could simply have been an isolated issue with the board's Web site.
The breakdown occurred about 8:15 p.m. as elections officials were loading tabulated results from absentee ballots onto the Web site. That kept the public and candidates from being able to see updated election results for more than two hours.
"At no time were the results of the election tabulation compromised or in danger of data manipulation," McGary said.
Greg Sullivan, director of information services for the county, said Wednesday that a Cincinnati Bell Fuse.net IP address had blasted the county's Web site with 95,000 attempted entries in 20 to 25 minutes, shutting down each server when he tried to switch over to a new one.
"What we originally thought as part of our initial evaluation was that the circumstances that caused the server to lock were an extremely large amount of traffic, and that is still proven to be the factor," he said Thursday.
