ATLANTA — Georgia election officers acted rapidly earlier this month to thwart an try and flood the state’s absentee voter portal in an obvious try and crash the location, the secretary of state’s workplace mentioned.
The assault was restricted to the portion of the state’s web site that voters use to request an absentee poll. Users could have skilled a short slowdown, however the website by no means crashed and no knowledge was compromised, mentioned Gabriel Sterling, a senior company official.
He mentioned it was unclear the place the assault got here from. There isn’t any public indication that related techniques in every other state have been topic to the identical sort of assault.
The Georgia secretary of state’s workplace alerted federal authorities to the assault. The FBI, the Federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to remark Thursday.
Tracking instruments deployed by the Secretary of State’s workplace generated a gradual processing alert shortly after 5pm on October 14, the day earlier than in-person early voting was to start. Sterling mentioned Internet safety agency Cloudflare despatched a sign inside minutes that it was a denial-of-service assault, which includes flooding a website with knowledge to overwhelm it and take it offline.
The Secretary of State’s workplace noticed that on the peak, at the very least 420,000 IP addresses have been attempting to entry the location on the similar time, Sterling mentioned. The workplace put in place a verification device that requires customers to show they’re human after which site visitors “simply collapsed,” Sterling mentioned. Within half-hour of the primary alarm, he mentioned all the pieces was again to regular.
Cloudflare informed Georgia officers that most of the IP addresses had been utilized in earlier denial-of-service assaults.
“Generally, our techniques labored,” Sterling mentioned. “We simply executed. There was completely no panic.”
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