Does Karl Rove Have A Pet Worm?

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.
Remember Slammer?

An incident report filed by the county explains the intrusion and temporary havoc wrought by the virus.

According to the two-page report (PDF format), a server on Sarasota County's database system was attacked by "a variant of the SQL Slammer worm." Once infected, as the report details, the server "sent traffic to other database servers on the Internet, and the traffic generated by the infected server rendered the firewall unavailable."

[Note re PDF: The incident occurred on 10/23/06 and the incident report was filed on 10/24/06. The second reference to the incident date as "10/14/06" is a typo, as confirmed by Sarasota County Information Security Analyst, Hal Logan, a member of the team filing the report.]

In a separate document, titled "Conduct of Election Report, Sarasota County General Election, November 7, 2006" there are two different Internet service outages mentioned, though the viral attack described in the incident report from the Sarasota County database security team --- presumably the source of one of those outages --- is not described or even mentioned specifically in that report. It's still unclear what the second incident referred to in that report may be.

The SQL Slammer Worm, commonly known as Slammer, was discovered in 2002.

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....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free