Georgia secretary of state's office thwarts election cyberattack, officials say

ATLANTA — The Georgia secretary of state’s office stopped a cyberattack this month targeted at the state’s absentee voting website.

A state cyberdefense team, along with the cybersecurity firm Cloudflare, prevented what is believed to be foreign hackers from shutting off the secretary of state’s absentee ballot website on the afternoon of Oct. 14, before the start of early voting.

“We were able to put in an interface that says ‘I am a human,’ which immediately mitigated the issue and only slowed it down and didn’t crash the site at all,” said Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the secretary of state’s office. “Our tools did everything right. This was a win.”

At the peak of the incident over 420,000 different IP addresses were attempting to attack the absentee site at the same time, Sterling said. He said the state’s election process was not interrupted by the attack.

It’s unclear why hackers aimed the attack at the absentee ballot website, as the site has no influence on voter registrations. Sterling called it “a probing attack” aimed at creating distrust of the process.

“You’ve got to think about it as a tactic and an overall scheme to undermine people’s faith in elections,” Sterling said. “That is what it really comes down to.”

The incident had “all of the hallmark signs of a foreign attack,” he said, but there is no way of verifying who was behind it. Before news of the attack broke, officials planned to publicize it after the election, Sterling said.

With Kamala Harris and Donald Trump running neck and neck in the polls, Georgia is one of several swing states in this year’s election that could decide who will be the country’s next president.

“The reason we are a target is because Georgia is at the center of the political universe,” Sterling said.

Cybersecurity experts expect targeted threats and attacks like this to persist throughout the election.

“2020 versus 2024, we are seeing similar but larger, more frequent cyber threats,” said Cliff Steinhauer, director of information and engagement at the National Cybersecurity Alliance.

This isn’t the first cyber threat aimed at Georgia elections. Following the 2020 presidential election, a group of tech experts hired by Trump supporters breached sensitive Coffee County election data.