Midterm Election Day passes without major cyber incidents; a few state websites strain under bot traffic
GovTech's roundup separates the real glitches (ballot scanners, website outages) from anything that touched the vote count.
The November 3 US midterms passed without significant cyber incidents, GovTech reports. Overnight reports from the election-security information-sharing center described one office facing failed exploitation attempts, a small number facing denial-of-service attacks or heavy web traffic, brief website interruptions, misleading text messages and a handful of bomb threats; none appeared to significantly limit voting. Former CISA director Chris Krebs told NPR it was "just another Tuesday on the internet."
Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs confirmed a cyberattack on his office's website, KOMO reports; some pages were briefly unavailable amid bot traffic, and he said the counties' tabulators are not connected to the internet. Colorado's election-night results site went down for about 45 minutes; its vendor, SOE Software, blamed unusually high automated traffic from results-scraping services across several vendors, and the state said ballots and results were unaffected.
The biggest problems were not cyberattacks: ballot scanners rejected ballots in most of Westchester County, New York, after a late programming change, and some Pennsylvania scanners jammed.
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Election security
After exploring 'Just Another Tuesday': Election Day Sees No Major Cyber Incidents, what election officials are guarding is laid out in Election security.
Election security covers protecting voting machines, election office networks and voter registration databases from cyberattacks and other threats.
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