Secretary of State’s Office says they stopped cyberattack aimed at crashing voter website – WSB-TV Channel 2 - Atlanta

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We are the center of the political universe. Our absentee ballot portal is live right now in the middle of an election. It is a ripe and juicy target for bad actors and enemy powers,” Sterling said.But the Secretary of State’s Office’s safeguards, partners, and information security team scattered among the rows of cubicles where the cyber experts work and teamed up to detect it in time to prevent the crash and to take steps to stop the attack.RELATED STORIES:Election 2024: Can you take a selfie with your ballot? It depends on stateElection 2024: What do amendments and referendums on Georgia ballot mean?Why political ads are required to air“On October 14, which was the last day to register to vote, at approximately 5:16 p.m. we saw a beginning of an increase of usage of people attempting to log in, and by 5:20 p.m. we saw a spike of around 420,00 individual entities attempting to access the absentee ballot portal. We identified it and attempted to mitigate it immediately, and you see it start to drop back down,” Sterling said.“Did you come up with a fix?” Winne asked Sterling.“We were able to, working with our partners, put in an interface that says basically are you a human and once we engaged that, we saw the level of attack lower very quickly,” Sterling said.Sterling told Winne that, most likely, at least most of the attempts to access the portal were carried out by so-called bots -- Sort of cyberspace robots -- not by people sitting at keyboards.“These different login attempts were from all over the globe. I mean from Indonesia, Brazil, United States, Viet Nam, Japan, Thailand,” Sterling said. “Many of these entities and these computers have been used in previous attacks around the world.”“You never know what could be coming over the horizon which is why we always have to keep on investing and working with our people and our processes every day every year. One of the things that we believe in talking to experts about this is this could’ve been a probing attack, which is basically, what do they have in place to stop these kinds of things, and if they don’t have them in place we could put more resources to try to cause more problems later. By having these resources in place to begin with, we have lowered the likelihood of such an attack being attempted in the future,” Sterling said.Sterling said because of the safeguards in place and swift action the only effect for Georgia voters was a brief slowdown on the absentee ballot portal.He told Winne that officials don’t know who was ultimately behind this, who coordinated it, but it may have been a foreign nation or someone acting in behalf of a foreign nation.©2024 Cox Media Group0View CommentsMost Read1 dead in shooting at McDonald’s in GwinnettPostal worker accused of stealing credit cards from mail on her routeMan who was head of DEA in Atlanta is now running day-to-day operations for agencyBUNDLE UP: Temperatures, wind chills to plummet after wintry mix moves outGA woman sues fertility clinic, says she gave birth to another patient’s babyNewsLocalWatch LiveVideoNation/WorldTrafficWeatherCurrent ConditionsStormtracker 2HD Radar5 Day ForecastContact UsAbout WSBTVWhat's On WSBTVEEO StatementAdvertise with WSBTVWSBTV Public FileFCC ApplicationsFollow Us WSB-TV Channel 2 - Atlanta facebook feed(Opens a new window)WSB-TV Channel 2 - Atlanta twitter feed(Opens a new window)WSB-TV Channel 2 - Atlanta instagram feed(Opens a new window)WSB-TV Channel 2 - Atlanta youtube feed(Opens a new window)
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Most of his press conference yesterday was just congratulating himself on his systematic and ongoing voter suppression campaign. He gave passing lip-service to actually facilitating votes. Remember despite death threats against himself and his family he is still Maga and thus a liar, a traitor and the enemy of the American people