ATLANTA — Georgia election officials acted quickly earlier this month to thwart an attempt to flood the state’s absentee voter portal in an apparent attempt to crash the site, the secretary of state’s office said.
The attack was limited to the part of the state’s website that voters use to request an absentee ballot. Users may have experienced a brief slowdown, but the site never crashed and no data was compromised, said Gabriel Sterling, a senior agency official.
He added that the origin of the attack was unclear. There is no public indication that similar systems in any other state have been subject to the same type of attack.
The Georgia Secretary of State’s office alerted federal authorities to the attack. The FBI, the Federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence all declined to comment Thursday.
Detection tools set up by the Secretary of State’s office generated an alert about a processing slowdown shortly after 5 p.m. on October 14, the day before in-person early voting began. Sterling said internet security company Cloudflare sent an indication within minutes that it was a denial of service attack, which involves flooding a site with data in order to overwhelm it and knock it offline. .
The secretary of state’s office was able to see that at the peak, at least 420,000 IP addresses were trying to access the site at the same time, Sterling said. The bureau implemented a verification tool requiring users to prove they were human, and then traffic “kind of collapsed,” Sterling said. Thirty minutes after the first alert, he said everything was back to normal.
Cloudflare told Georgia officials that many of the IP addresses had been used in previous denial-of-service attacks.
“In general, our systems worked,” Sterling said. “We just executed. There was no panic at all.
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