Re: Florida: Voter registration website overwhelmed at deadline

[Mike Hammett <nanog () ics-il net>]

I understand that there is underlying work that can't be sourced somewhere else, at least not trivially. 


How many of these overloaded web sites that we hear about (voter registration, unemployment registration, web sites 
announced in a big way, causing surges in traffic, etc.) have a CDN offloading the low-hanging fruit? 


I know that processing a voter registration is far more intensive than serving up static images, but surely a CDN 
taking the low hanging fruit would help to some degree. I'm assuming most of the people running these sites are 
clueless and haven't looked at this, but maybe they have. 




----- 
Mike Hammett 
Intelligent Computing Solutions 

Midwest Internet Exchange 

The Brothers WISP 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Sean Donelan" <sean () donelan com> 
To: nanog () nanog org 
Sent: Tuesday, October 6, 2020 11:51:39 AM 
Subject: Florida: Voter registration website overwhelmed at deadline 


Every election has problems. Most of the time, those problems aren't 
noticed. Elections rely on a lot of back-end infrastructure, besides the 
actual voting itself. 

It could be a DDOS attack, or simply duct-taped systems having trouble 
with the load. 

Voting early (mail, drop-off, in-person) means more time to fix glitches. 



https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-election-2020-florida-elections-ron-desantis-dc8aaf2213b6c50451019a7c0c07c3f7 

The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned 
elections officials nationwide last week that cyberattacks could disrupt 
their systems during the run-up to the election. They particularly noted 
“distributed denial-of-service” attacks, which inundate a computer system 
with requests, potentially clogging up servers until the system becomes 
inaccessible to legitimate users.