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No digital disruption has affected the counting of midterm ballots after a tense Election Day, when officials were closely monitoring threats at home and abroad.
Some state and local governments appear to have been hit by a relatively rudimentary form of cyberattack that periodically makes public websites inaccessible. But U.S. and local officials said Wednesday that no one had breached vote-counting infrastructure.
“We have not seen any evidence that any voting system removed or lost ballots, changed ballots or in any way in any race in the country,” Jane Eastley, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, said in a statement. got damage.”
Protecting U.S. elections has become more complex than ever, with the most serious threats coming from home, CISA and other federal agencies have warned. Foreign adversaries such as Russia, China and Iran have attempted to meddle in individual campaigns and amplify false or misleading narratives on social media.
Many members of the increasingly testy American public have seized on an unproven conspiracy about voter fraud. There have been concerns that state-backed intruders or criminals could try to tamper with voter rolls or steal data for ransom. Equally worrying is the growing number of physical and online threats to election workers.
Votes are still being counted across the country, and no winner has been predicted in some of the key races that will determine control of the House and Senate.
“It is important to remember that this thorough and thoughtful process can take days or weeks, depending on state law; these rigorous processes are the reason the American people can have confidence in the security and integrity of their elections ,” Eastley said in a statement.
The Mississippi secretary of state’s website was down for part of Tuesday, and there were other reports that sites were unavailable across the country, including in Champaign County, Illinois, and parts of Arkansas.
Mississippi has apparently been hit with a “distributed denial of service,” in which websites are rendered inaccessible by a flood of inauthentic traffic. Federal and state officials said they could not say who was responsible for the Mississippi attack or other denial of service incidents, although a pro-Russian group has called on social media platform Telegram to let its followers target the site.
“While attribution is inherently difficult, we do not see any evidence that these are part of a broad coordinated campaign,” an official with CISA, the DHS’ cybersecurity arm, said in a Tuesday briefing. Rules, the official requested anonymity.
Illinois Board of Elections spokesman Matt Dietrich said state officials had reached out to Champaign County a month after seeing a tweet from county clerks claiming their website had been “under attack.”
Dietrich said the state commission requested information on the issue but provided insufficient data to determine that an attack had occurred.
Alexander Leslie, an analyst at cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, called any attack “negligible, at best, a minor annoyance.”
The pro-Russian group that claimed responsibility for the destruction of Mississippi’s website also tried to organize an attack on democrats.org, which is run by the Democratic National Committee. Leslie said there was no evidence the DNC’s website was affected.
Killnet, a much larger pro-Russian hacking group with 100,000 online followers, took down some state government and airport websites in October and has not organized any online attempts to attack U.S. election infrastructure.
This may be because such digital systems “are difficult targets. CISA has fairly high cybersecurity standards,” Leslie said. “It doesn’t look good for Killnet if they claim to have carried out a series of attacks that did nothing at all.”
States have also stepped up their defenses. Illinois has established eight “cyber navigators,” each responsible for multiple counties in the state. Clerks are encouraged to report issues to the Navigator so they can quickly involve experts.
Mississippi Republican Senator Scott Delano is a legislative advisor to the state’s Department of Information Technology Services. He told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Mississippi government websites typically face “hundreds or even thousands” of attempted breaches every day — not uncommon in today’s online world.
For example, the site’s inaccessibility means residents can’t use the site’s information about polling district locations. Delano said the secretary of state maintains a separate database for statewide voter registration information that was not affected by the attack. The day’s election results aren’t posted on the Mississippi secretary of state’s website, so those results aren’t affected either.
In a statement, Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson praised the technologists for “working hard to keep the Mississippi elections safe, and through their hard work, we can confidently say that our electoral system has not been compromised.”
“We will continue to work … to ensure that as cyber attacks increase in frequency and intelligence, we are prepared and have the necessary resources to fight any and all attacks,” Watson said.
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