The Georgia secretary of state’s office has successfully thwarted a cyberattack, believed to have originated from a foreign entity, targeting the website used by voters to request absentee ballots.
The attack aimed to crash the system ahead of the upcoming presidential election on November 5. Despite attempts to overwhelm the site with malicious traffic, voters’ ability to request absentee ballots did not suffer, according to Gabriel Sterling, an official in the Secretary of State’s office.
As per CNN, Sterling stated that the attack carried “the hallmarks of a foreign power or a foreign entity acting at the behest of a foreign power.” However, US officials have yet to confirm the origin publicly.
Taking the matter to social media platform X, he expressed his relief and wrote, “ This was a big win for our cyber security team and our partners. We work every day to protect Georgia voters and our systems”.
The cyberattack involved hundreds of thousands of IP addresses from various countries flooding the Georgia website with bogus traffic. The state’s cyber defences, aided by Cloudflare, a San Francisco-based cybersecurity firm, successfully repelled the assault.
