Mississippi government websites experienced outages amid a flood of malicious traffic on Election Day, but officials said the voting system remained secure despite broader fears of hackers looking to sow doubt or disrupt election processes nationwide.
Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson said his team and the state’s information technology department spotted government websites affected by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that overwhelm internet targets with a flood of traffic.
“An abnormally large increase in traffic volume due to DDoS activity caused the public facing side of our websites to be periodically inaccessible this afternoon,” Mr. Watson’s office said on Tuesday evening. “We want to be extremely clear and reassure Mississippians our election system is secure and has not been compromised.”
The Mississippi secretary of state’s office told The Washington Times on Wednesday it did not yet have confirmation regarding who was responsible for the malicious cyber activity.
Mr. Watson published a tweet indicating that there was a Russian connection. Shortly before midnight on Wednesday, Mr. Watson said his team’s resolve strengthened as the cyberattack intensified.
“To my team, well done! Proud of our hard work today. (2/2),” Mr. Watson said on Twitter. “MS 1, Russia 0.”
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Mississippi was not the only state with election officials suggesting they were tested by DDoS attacks.
Illinois’ Champaign County Clerk and Recorder Aaron Ammons said Tuesday his office’s website had faced cyberattacks in the run-up to Election Day, in response to a disgruntled voter on Twitter.
“Our website has been under constant attack for the past month and we’ve been able to keep the site up,” Mr. Ammons said on Twitter via the county clerk’s account. “We believe the issue today is due to our VR vendor being attacked. We are working with them to resolve the issue.”
Kankakee County in Illinois also used the same voter registration vendor and told the News-Gazette in Champaign that it had connectivity issues but thought it was premature to attribute the problem to cyberattacks.
Asked about the cyber problems facing Champaign, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) declined to answer and referred questions back to local Illinois officials.
CISA has responsibility for federal cyber defense and risk management, including for election infrastructure. CISA had witnessed no specific or credible threat to disrupt election infrastructure as of Tuesday morning, according to reports.
Other states experienced intermittent web outages or headaches on Tuesday as well. Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin said on Tuesday morning that his state’s GeauxVote app, online portal, and elections hotline had technical difficulties, but he followed up on Twitter within three hours to say the issues were resolved.
Nevada’s secretary of state’s office told NBC News that outages in its state were not attributable to malicious activity but a hardware issue.
CISA Director Jen Easterly said Wednesday that election officials are still testing and auditing equipment and tabulating votes, but her agency had confidence in the security and integrity of the midterm elections.
“We have seen no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised in any race in the country,” Ms. Easterly said in a statement.
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