Cyberattack crashes Tennessee county's website on election night

A local election in Tennessee is dealing with the aftermath of a cyberattack, and the county's mayor is calling for an investigation.

On Tuesday night, as polls were closing for Knox County's primary races for the mayoral election, the county's website displaying the results crashed. The page was down for about an hour starting around 8 p.m. before officials were able to restore it, according to the county's Election Commission.

"Although the crash did not affect the vote tallies or the integrity of the election, this is not something that should happen," Mayor Tim Burchett said in a statement on 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 primary election continued, with the county announcing that Glenn Jacobs, also known as WWE wrestler Kane, had won the GOP nomination by 17 votes. The attack did not affect votes because the county's voting machines are not connected online, an election official told WBIR.

Cyberattacks against elections are a major concern for the US. The Department of Homeland Security has warned against voting machine hacks as well as targeted attacks against campaigns. The agency said that in 2016 hackers targeted election systems in 21 states, and election officials are on high alert for future attacks.

The cyberattack in Tennessee was a public showcase of how hackers could strike, even in a local election. The Knox County IT director, Dick Moran, said that the website's servers crashed after seeing "extremely heavy and abnormal network traffic" from IP addresses both from the US and from outside the country.

"Based on my experience, this was highly suggestive of a [denial of service] attack," Moran said in a statement.

DDoS attacks flood a website's servers until those computers can't handle the excessive traffic and crash. Many cybercriminals online offer DDoS attacks as a service, some for as little as $15. It's unclear who was behind the attack on the Knox County website.

Burchett said the county is hiring Sword & Shield Enterprise Security, a local security company, to investigate the attack.

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