ATLANTA — Early this month, officials in Georgia took swift action to prevent an attempt to overwhelm the state’s absentee ballot request portal, according to the state’s election office. This effort was aimed at causing disruption, but the website remained functional throughout the incident. Gabriel Sterling, a leading figure within the agency, emphasized that voters may have encountered a slight delay, but there was no complete shutdown, and no sensitive data was compromised.
The source of the attempted attack remains unidentified. So far, there has been no indication that similar incidents have affected absentee ballot systems in other states.
In response to the attempted breach, Georgia officials informed federal agencies about the situation. Major agencies, including the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, opted not to provide comments regarding the incident.
Detection systems established by the secretary of state’s office signaled an issue shortly after 5 p.m. on October 14, just a day before early voting was set to commence. Sterling noted that the internet security company Cloudflare promptly identified the situation as a denial-of-service attack, which aims to flood a website with excessive data to render it non-functional.
During the peak of the incident, officials observed that more than 420,000 IP addresses were attempting to access the voter portal simultaneously. To combat this surge, the office implemented a verification system requiring users to demonstrate they were human, resulting in a significant drop in traffic. Sterling reported that the system returned to normal operations within about 30 minutes of the initial alert.
Cloudflare informed Georgia’s officials that numerous IP addresses involved in this attempted denial-of-service activity had been linked to prior attacks. Sterling remarked that in general, their systems responded effectively to the incident. “We just executed. There was no panic at all,” he said, underscoring the preparedness of the state election office.
