On Wednesday, October 23, the Secretary of State’s office in the state of Georgia announced that its absentee ballot application website had recently successfully fended off a cyber attack from overseas, during which the website was not affected or interrupted.
Officials from the Secretary of State’s office, including Gabe Sterling, stated that with the assistance of the technology company Cloudflare, Georgia’s network defense system successfully repelled hackers attempting to disrupt the absentee ballot application website. Sterling pointed out that this attack likely originated from overseas and exhibited characteristics of “foreign powers or foreign entities (acting at the request of foreign powers).”
Sterling mentioned that Georgia’s voting website suffered a substantial amount of fake traffic attacks sent from multiple countries, with this fake traffic coming from hundreds of thousands of different IP addresses, with the aim of disrupting or disabling the website, making it difficult for voters to apply for ballots. Fortunately, this attack did not affect the operation of the ballot application process. Sterling stated, “This wave of attacks slowed our system a bit, but never caused it to stop operating.”
From the perspective of experts, Sterling indicated that this incident was a probing attack designed to observe how Georgia would respond to such a situation and to investigate the state’s security system’s defense capabilities.
Georgia began early voting on October 15, attracting over 300,000 voters on the first day, setting a record-high turnout rate in the state’s history. Early voting in Georgia will continue until November 1.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) declined to comment. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) of the United States will be passing the issue onto Georgia officials.
CNN has reached out to Cloudflare, based in San Francisco, for comment, but the company has not yet responded.