The Georgia Secretary of State’s office has successfully prevented a cyberattack, believed to be launched by a foreign entity, from targeting the voter absentee ballot request website.
The attackers sought to crash the system in advance of the November 5 presidential election, but despite the effort to flood the site with malicious traffic, the ability of voters to request absentee ballots remained unaffected, said Gabriel Sterling, a senior official in the office.
According to CNN, Sterling remarked that the attack bore "the hallmarks of a foreign power or an entity acting on behalf of a foreign power," though U.S. officials have not yet publicly confirmed the attack's origin.
Sterling took to the social media platform X to express his relief, saying, "This was a significant victory for our cybersecurity team and partners. We work tirelessly every day to safeguard Georgia voters and our systems."
The attack involved hundreds of thousands of IP addresses from multiple countries sending false traffic to overwhelm the Georgia website, but the state's cybersecurity defenses, bolstered by San Francisco-based firm Cloudflare, successfully blocked the attempt.
