CISA Reports No Significant Attacks On US Elections
Following early warnings of the threat of interference from malicious foreign hackers in advance of this week's US House and Senate elections the US election processes continues to be a target of interest for malicious actors.
Now, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has confirmed there were a number of cyber attacks on State and local election websites during the 2022 midterms.
Reassuringly, however, those early warnings have been heeded by the local-level government agencies responsible for running the elections and no significant harm has been identified.
“Election systems that house voter registration information or manage non-voting election processes continue to be a target of interest for malicious threat actors,” says CISA's report. However, there has been no specific or credible threat to disrupt election infrastructure or Election Day operations. “We’ve seen no activity that should cause anyone to question the security, integrity or resilience of our election infrastructure,” said a senior CISA official said.
In Mississippi, the secretary of state’s website, which serves as a digital resource for election-related information and is not involved in vote tabulations, was temporarily inaccessible after experiencing “an abnormally large increase in traffic volume due to DDoS activity,” the office said in a statement. These were attempts to disrupt access to websites and servers by overwhelming them with manipulated online traffic, often through the use of bots or a network of hijacked computers.
“We want to be extremely clear and reassure Mississippians our election system is secure and has not been compromised,” the Mississippi secretary of state’s office confirmed.
CISA worked closely with state and local jurisdictions to help officials detect and stop cyber-attacks and threats made against election management and 14 states used cyber teams to help secure voting systems. This cyber security work has been successful for this election, as CISA has said it was only “checking a handful” of jurisdictions.
CISA: NextGov: DefenseOne: Cyberwire: The Record:
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