Cyber experts say ‘system overload’ caused Florida election websites outage

ORLANDO, Fla. — County election websites are now restored after the majority were down as results were coming in Tuesday night.

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Now, the question is how this happened and what’s being done to avoid it in November.

Channel 9′s Ashlyn Webb spoke to cyber experts who explained that the systems appeared overwhelmed.

The Florida Secretary of State called it a “vendor issue.” It caused 59 out of the 67 county websites to shut down during its peak use when polls were closing and election offices were reporting results.

That vendor, VR Systems, said the crash was caused by a misconfiguration of logging.

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We spoke to cyber experts like Jon Taylor with Orlando-based Fortress Information Security. He described it as a system overload.

“For web server systems, anytime you get traffic into the site, there’s an option to log that traffic. Usually, it’s turned down to a point where it’s not an issue, especially when you’re expecting a lot of visitors. If they didn’t do that, if they left it logging at a very high level, it really can create just a massive, massive file and just almost lock up and shut down the whole system,” Taylor said.

With that, there are questions on how much preparation and testing went into the system before Tuesday.

“It’s possible that the testing was done, and it didn’t take into account the load that the server would be faced with during election day,” said Luke Connolly, cyber threat analyst with Emsisoft.

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“Our test nights should not be primary nights, right? They need to be tested in an environment before we go to anything because there’s so much focus on election integrity issues that this kind of a false start is just bad,” Taylor said.

Cyber experts say VR Systems needs to answer the same questions that CrowdStrike is after the crash last month.

“So what does their quality insurance process have that would ensure that this doesn’t take place in the future?” Connolly said.

Read: Elections websites restored following ‘cyber incident’ in most Florida counties

“They really need to make sure that they are 100% up and up, ready to answer any questions. Everything’s tested and ready to go, and that you don’t get the the hiccups when it when it really counts, when it really matters,” Taylor said.

VR Systems said in a statement to Eyewitness News that it’s working with “external technical experts to assist us with further analyzing and optimizing our systems to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

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