Georgia election official says battleground state fended off cyberattack likely from a foreign country

Georgia’s secretary of state’s office this month fended off a cyberattack believed to have come from a foreign country against the website voters use to request absentee ballots, the office told CNN.

The state’s cyber defenses — aided by tech firm Cloudflare — repelled the hackers’ attempts to knock the absentee ballot website offline, and there was no disruption to voters’ ability to request ballots.

“It slowed our systems down for a little bit, but it never stopped our systems from working,” Gabe Sterling, an official in Georgia’s secretary of state’s office, which oversees elections in the battleground state, told CNN.

The cyberattack likely originated from overseas and had “the hallmarks of a foreign power or a foreign entity [acting] at the behest of a foreign power,” Sterling said.

US officials have yet to publicly confirm that assessment.

Hundreds of thousands of IP addresses from numerous countries flooded the Georgia website with bogus traffic, Sterling said in an interview on Wednesday.

“From talking to experts, it felt like a probing attack, saying, ‘Hey, if we do this, what will they do in response?’” Sterling said.

CNN has requested comment from Cloudflare, a San Francisco-based firm that protects large portions of the internet from cyberattacks.

The FBI and US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are aware of the cyberattack and worked with the Georgia secretary of state’s office in the aftermath of the incident, sources told CNN. The FBI declined to comment. CISA referred questions to officials in Georgia.

The incident is a reminder of the keen interest that hackers take in election-related targets with the US presidential race in its final days. In a given election cycle, a range of cybercriminals and state-backed hacking groups might opportunistically target political campaigns and election offices for their own purposes.

None of the cyber activity has prevented the casting or tallying of votes so far; it’s instead often aimed at voters’ perceptions of the democratic process.

Separate from the Georgia incident, Iranian government-linked hackers have researched and probed election-related websites in multiple US swing states, in a possible effort to discover vulnerabilities that could be used to influence the election, Microsoft said on Wednesday.

Election offices in Georgia are no stranger to cyber threats.

Georgia’s Coffee County was hit with a cyberattack in April that forced the county to sever its connection to the state’s voter registration system as a precautionary measure, CNN previously reported.