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 that part of the state’s website, which 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 top official at the agency.
He said it was not clear where the attack originated. There has been no public indication that similar systems in any other state were subject to the same kind of attack.
The Georgia secretary of state’s office alerted federal authorities about 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 that the secretary of state’s office has in place generated an alert about a processing slowdown shortly after 5 p.m. on Oct. 14, the day before early in-person voting was to start. Sterling said internet security firm 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.
