Barroso asks the Federal Police to investigate the attack on the...

The attack, called “denial of service with thousands of simultaneous access attempts,” consisted of 436,000 connections per second on Sunday morning in an attempt to overturn the system of the Superior Electoral Court.

According to the minister, the massive shots came from Brazil, the United States and New Zealand.

“The attack failed to overcome the barriers and was duly repelled by our security mechanisms,” said Barroso.

In addition to the cyber attack, the minister also asked the PF to investigate the leak of old data, more than ten years old, from former ministers and ex-court officials.

According to him, this leak occurred on a “past date”, not yet identified, but was released on Sunday as a way to discredit the court’s computer system.

“As soon as they were leaked, digital militias immediately went into action trying to discredit the system. There is a suspicion of the articulation of extremist groups, which strive to discredit the institutions, call for the return of the dictatorship. And many of them are investigated by the Federal Supreme Court, ”he declared.

Barroso said he talked about the investigation this Monday morning with the director general of the Federal Police, delegate Rolando Alexandre de Souza. “I asked him for the investigation that is justified in this case, a serious and wide-ranging investigation,” he said.

Barroso talks about delay in total vote and result of municipal elections

Barroso said that, according to the information technology service of the TSE, the origin of the problem in the totalization of votes – which caused a delay of at least two hours in the disclosure of the results of the poll – was the delay in the arrival of a supercomputer.

According to the minister, the TSE hired the services of the Oracle company to supply the supercomputer for a new task: the totalization of votes centralized in the TSE – and no longer decentralized by the regional electoral courts (TREs).

Until the previous election, ballot papers were transmitted to the TREs’ computers, which totaled the votes and sent the result to the TSE. This year, the court changed the procedure and centralized the totalization of votes in Brasília. The option for centralized aggregation was recommended by the Federal Police for security reasons, informed the minister.

The supercomputer service was contracted in March, but due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the equipment only arrived in August, Barroso said. The delay prevented the court’s technical team from carrying out all the tests necessary for the software to learn how to calculate the data with the necessary speed and volume.

“Due to limitations in previous tests, on election day, artificial intelligence took a long time to learn to process the data at the volume and speed at which they arrived. Hence its slowness and freezing, which demanded that the totalization was interrupted and started. The detection and solution of the problem generated a delay of approximately two hours, ”he said.

The Information Technology Secretary of the Superior Electoral Court, Giuseppe Janino, said that PF experts identified that the risk of attacking the electoral system would be greater with the totalization in the TREs because there would be 27 possible targets. Centralization reduces the number of targets to one, and the TSE has a greater capacity to protect itself.

“The move from totaling to TSE was due to a recommendation by the Federal Police for a security measure. I commented yesterday that I had no sympathy for the measure, but later I was informed that it was an important security issue ”, declared Minister Luís Roberto Barroso.

“If I had the same information that previous management had, I would have made the same decision as they did. When I said I had no sympathy, it was about managing this change ”, added the minister.

The TSE president said the court’s technology team is still looking into whether the problems presented by the e-Título smartphone app were system-related or supportive.

According to Barroso, there was a large amount of downloads in a short time, which may have overloaded the servers.

The e-Título was the most used document in the first round, said the president.

According to the minister, until Sunday, the app had more than 13 million downloads and 600 thousand justifications made by the app.

On Monday (16), another 460 thousand people justified the absence in the election by e-Título. 700 thousand downloads were recorded.

The TSE released a balance sheet of the first round of the elections.

• The abstention rate was 23.14% – in 2016 the percentage of voters who did not attend was 25.33%.
• The states with the lowest abstention rate were Piauí (15.42%); Paraíba (15.79%) and Ceará (16.93%).
• According to the court, white votes for mayor totaled 3,909,362 and null, 7,044,774.
• In the election for councilor, 4,465,261 voters voted blank and 5,663,728 canceled the votes.