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“We saw a spike of around 420,000 individual entities attempting to access the absentee ballot portal,” said Gabe Sterling, an official in the Georgia secretary of state’s office.
Georgia’s secretary of state warded off a cybersecurity threat this month against what was most likely an attack by a foreign country targeting its website that voters can use to request absentee ballots.
An unusual spike in users on the site appeared to be an attempt to shut it down. There were ultimately no disruptions to absentee ballot access. State and local election officials have faced increasing threats, both to their operations and physical safety, that have made the otherwise mundane, bureaucratic work of election management increasingly risky.
The secretary of state’s office thwarted a sudden rise in users trying to access the site on Oct. 14, a tactic sometimes used by hackers to send a website offline by overwhelming it with requests, WSB-TV, a broadcaster in Atlanta, reported. A spokesman for the Georgia secretary of state confirmed this reporting.
“We saw a spike of around 420,000 individual entities attempting to access the absentee ballot portal,” Gabe Sterling, an official in the secretary of state’s office, told WSB-TV. “We identified it and attempted to mitigate it immediately, and you see it start to drop back down.”
Mr. Sterling also said that the attack may have come from a foreign country, although details were not clear.
This is not the first cybersecurity threat Georgia election officials have faced. In 2022, a group of allies to former President Donald J. Trump tried to access voter data in Coffee County. The county also faced its own cybersecurity attack this year, according to CNN. Poll workers have faced threats of violence around the country.
Simon J. Levien is a Times political reporter covering the 2024 elections and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers. More about Simon J. Levien
See more on: 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis
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Source: nytimes.com
