The Online Newspaper of Lakewood High School

Lakewood Times

Lakewood Times

Lakewood Times

    Hackers and Elections

    Hackers+and+Elections

    Tuesday was an aggravating day for Knox County, Tennessee. As the day came to an end and the primary election doors were closing everything took a turn for the worse. The site displaying the results of the mayoral election crashed. According to officials, the site was only down for about an hour.

    It was confirmed later that none of the votes were elected but it was also stated that something like this shouldn’t be happening. Mayor Tim Burchett said in a statement Wednesday. “I want to know what happened, and I think an independent review will help determine that so we can move forward and work to prevent similar issues in the future.”

    The election continued after the fiasco and the new mayor Glenn Jacobs, better known by his WWE name Kane won the GOP nomination.

    Cyber attacks are a serious problem these days and are taken very seriously. Over the past few years and especially now the Department of Homeland Security is warning the public about voting machines being a target for hackers.

    It was confirmed later that Knox Counties website was seeing extremely heavy abnormal traffic in the hours leading up to the election results and it eventually crashed the servers. This making the counties website another victim of a DDoS attack.

    This may just be a local election but the issue is real in elections of every scale. Hackers are moving faster than the security systems implemented in most places these days so this has led to a new arms race for cybersecurity. This is just one of many cyber attacks in recent times and is just reminding us everything no matter how big or small is a target for cyber attacks.

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