Top Georgia Official Says State Fended Off Election-Related Cyberattack

Voters cast ballots in Georgia's primary election at a polling location in Atlanta, Ga., on May 21, 2024. Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

Georgia officials thwarted an attempt to flood the state’s absentee voter portal in an apparent bid to crash the site, the secretary of state’s office said on the evening of Oct. 23.

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, the chief operating officer in the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.

Sterling 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, and federal government agencies have not offered public comments on the alleged incident.

In the incident, at least 420,000 IP addresses were trying to access the site at the same time, which appeared to be anomalous, Sterling said. The office responded by implementing a verification system that required users to offer proof they are human, he said.

After the verification was imposed, the traffic “just sort of fell through the floor,” Sterling said. Everything was back to normal within 30 minutes, he said.

Speaking to local outlet WSB-TV, Sterling said that there were a number of login attempts coming from around the world, later adding that the cyberattack attempt may have originated from another country.

“These different login attempts were from all over the globe. I mean from Indonesia, Brazil, United States, Vietnam, Japan, Thailand,” he said. “Many of these entities and these computers have been used in previous attacks around the world.”

“The attack was detected and mitigated quickly. Security is our focus,” Sterling wrote on social media platform X on the evening of Oct 24, corroborating the comments he made to WSB-TV.

The Epoch Times contacted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Georgia Secretary of State’s office for comment.

The FBI, CISA, and other U.S. intelligence officials have issued warnings in recent weeks that malign actors in China, Russia, and Iran may seek to disrupt or spread discord ahead of the Nov. 5 election. U.S. officials have already said that Iran was able to breach the presidential campaign of former President Donald Trump and obtain sensitive materials, which Iran then attempted to hand over to President Joe Biden’s now-ended campaign earlier this year.

Over the weekend, the FBI and CISA released an update saying there is “no information suggesting cyber activity against U.S. election infrastructure” was compromised and that there is no evidence voter registration information or similar systems were impacted anywhere in the United States.

Foreign adversaries may still try to promote “false or misleading narratives” to sway the election or to undermine U.S. confidence in its election systems and processes, the agencies said.

They said that foreign actors are using AI, or artificial intelligence, to “develop and distribute more compelling synthetic media messaging campaigns and inauthentic news articles” as well as “deepfakes” ahead of the election, adding that synthetic messages and images have been spread across numerous U.S.-based platforms.

With less than two weeks to go before the Nov. 5 election, Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris honed in on their closing messages with a series of rallies across multiple swing states.

The former president will be holding rallies in Tempe, Arizona, and Las Vegas on Oct. 24. Trump is also planning to make a stop in Austin, Texas, to appear on podcast host Joe Rogan’s popular show on Oct 25, and he will also hold a rally there.

The vice president plans to hold a rally on the night of Oct 24 in the Atlanta suburbs with former President Barack Obama and singer Bruce Springsteen. In addition to battleground state appearances, Harris will visit Houston with a speech that will focus on abortion.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.