Cyberattack crashes Knox County election website; votes unaffected

The Knox County website that displays election results crashed on election night due to a "deliberate" and "widespread" cyberattack, officials said.

Officials described the cyberattack as a distributed denial-of-service attack, which is an attempt to disable an online service by overloading it with computer traffic that comes — or appears to come — from many sources.

The cyberattack had no effect on vote tallies. It only prevented officials from displaying election results to the public through the Knox County Election Commission's website, according to Richard Moran, the IT director for the county.

The website went down about 8 p.m. Tuesday after the county's computers crashed from a massive amount of traffic that appeared to be coming from "many, many servers all over the country and all over the world," Moran said.

Moran, who said he's worked in IT for 40 years, said the county has seen similar denial-of-service attacks before. "But never on election night," he said.

While the website was down, most members of the public were unable to see who was winning in a slew of primary elections, including a hotly-contested county mayoral race and a county sheriff race.

Sheriff candidate Lee Tramel apparently obtained the early voting returns elsewhere, as he conceded to his opponent Tom Spangler about 8:40 p.m.

Meanwhile, the screens hanging in the Knox County GOP election party at the downtown Crowne Plaza hotel were blank other than the words, "Service Unavailable," in the top left corner.

"There's no way to totally prepare for" this kind of cyberattack, Moran said. "There's nothing you can do if you're going to allow people from the outside to come into your website."

The website appeared to come back online just before 9 p.m., and it ran smoothly — for the most part — for the rest of the night.

The county had 11 security experts working to resolve the problem.