Developing: DFL Pollfinder Hacked 30min Before Polls Opened

I have this from a highly placed source familiar with the DFL Pollfinder application…

About two weeks ago, a vulnerability was discovered in Mongrel that allows an attacker to submit a simple HTTP request with malformed MIME body that causes the application to fall into an infinite loop - crippling the application and possibly causing a kernel panic on the OS.

Mongrel, which is a web server one can use to run applications written in ruby running on the rails framework.

Guess what was discovered this morning, 30 minutes before polls opened in Minnesota on the sever running DFL pollfinder?

Kernel Panic.

You don’t need to be a Linux geek to know that any technology term with the word ‘panic’ in it is bad. My source said that it is almost assured that this was not a coincidence, that the DFL pollfinder application server was compromised, 30 minutes before polls opened, by a motivated attacker familiar with the Mongrel vulnerability.

More on this as information comes in - I can’t emphasize enough how serious and nefarious this is, far from the usual Republican dirty tricks - this is definitely illegal. Fortunatly for voters, the vulnerability was patched and the application and its many parts were recovered and are now happily telling people where to vote.

More on this as information comes in…