ATLANTA — Georgia’s Secretary of State's Office thwarted a cyberattack aimed at the state’s absentee voter website, officials confirmed. Because of the state’s response, officials said voters will be unaffected.
But how exactly did they stop it?
State officials said they noticed an unexpected spike in cyber activity on their election system and shut it down before the attackers could do any damage.
It came on Oct. 14, the last day to register to vote. On a government website that might normally have a hundred users at any given time, hundreds of thousands of simultaneous hits flooded the state’s online absentee ballot portal.
"The intention of a DDOS attack – which is a 'distributed denial of service' attack – is basically to crash your site," said Gabriel Sterling, the secretary of state's chief operating officer.
After 5 p.m., they saw a spike of 420,00 log-ins on the absentee voting site, Sterling said.
The logins were bots, not individuals from countries like Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Brazil and the United States, though Sterling said Russia or China was the likely origin of the attack.
"Some people do it just for fun. In this case, we think it was being done to attempt to undermine people's faith in the election system we have in place," Sterling said, noting Georgia's fraught history in 2020, where former president Donald Trump claimed victory despite losing the state by nearly 12,000 votes.
"We have very real (election-related) threats from our foreign adversaries like Russia, Iran and China," said the federal CISA director Jan Easterly during a press briefing Thursday.
Sterling said the secretary of state’s team needed less than 30 minutes to shut down the attack. The team did so by adding a widget to the page requiring the user to "confirm you're a human" by clicking a button on the page.
In the 10 days since, he said no attacks have recurred, and no systems connected to the state's voting system were affected.