The cyberattacks can lead to people missing out on voter registration deadlines, said a security expert group.
Federal agencies issued an alert of a possible cyberattack targeting the November elections, warning that a specific hacking technique could prevent access to critical election information.
The alert was issued on Wednesday by the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) for potential distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against election infrastructure. In such attacks, internet servers are flooded with enough requests to slow down servers to such a point that they become inaccessible or crash. This prevents regular users from accessing the servers and online resources.
In the context of elections, a DDoS attack could end up preventing voters from accessing websites detailing how to vote or register to vote.
The agencies said that DDoS attacks “could disrupt the availability of some election-related functions, like voter look-up tools or unofficial election night reporting.” However, they also said that it would not affect the “integrity of election processes.”
In the event of an attack against election infrastructure, “the underlying data and internal systems would remain uncompromised, and anyone eligible to vote would still be able to cast a ballot,” they said.
“With Election Day less than 100 days away, it is important to help put into context some of the incidents the American public may see during the election cycle,” said CISA senior adviser Cait Conley.
Despite the agencies’ claim that there have been no cases of Americans losing their votes from DDoS attacks, it is possible that disruption from such an attack could affect voting, according to a post by the Center for Internet Security. A well-timed attack targeting the voter registration process could prevent certain people from accessing critical websites, resulting in those people missing out on registration deadlines, the center noted.
The federal agencies said that hackers in the past “have falsely claimed DDoS attacks have compromised the integrity of voting systems to mislead the public that their attack would prevent a voter from casting a ballot or change votes already cast.”
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