Sophos, a world leader in anti-virus
protection for business, has found out that the counting of votes
in Will County, Illinois, was this week disrupted by a computer
virus.
According to local media reports, some of Will County's
precincts, which electronically transmit results to a central
server, were unable to do so because this server was flooded with
bogus requests as a result of a virus infection. The website
designed to publish election results as they came in crashed during
the attack, denying voters and candidates from discovering the
results.
Will County's electorate was voting for various local council
positions, including city mayors. Its Director of Information
Systems said that he had informed the FBI of the incident, and
believed the virus may have originated in Japan.
"Remember the rumpus about the hanging chads in Florida? This
virus incident highlights the possible future dangers of e-voting,"
said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos
Anti-Virus. "Countries considering opening up democracy to the
online world in order to appeal to a younger generation need to
take care not to open it up to internet-borne attacks too."
Sophos advises all computer users to ensure their anti-virus
software is kept up to date and to practice safe computing to avoid infection.
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.